How Many States Are in Australia?

Six. That is the textbook answer, and nobody disputes it — but six states describe only part of the country. Australia also runs ten territories, and one of them is larger than the entire mainland.

The six states are New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, Western Australia and Tasmania. That figure is fixed and uncontested — unlike the count of countries in Europe, there is no argument to be had about it. What “6” hides is everything else Australia governs: three territories on the mainland, seven more scattered across two oceans, and a claim on Antarctica that dwarfs the country itself. The interesting question is not how many states there are. It is how much the number leaves out.

Below: an explorer for all sixteen of Australia’s states and territories — tap any one to hear its name spoken — and a game that tests whether you can name them from their outline.

Six states — older than the country

The states were not created by Australia; Australia was created from them. Each was a self-governing British colony before 1 January 1901, when they joined in federation to form the Commonwealth. Western Australia was the last to commit, voting to join only weeks before federation day. The reluctance never fully faded: in a 1933 referendum, Western Australians voted roughly two-to-one to leave the federation again — a result the British Parliament declined to act on.

The territories the number leaves out

Three territories sit on the mainland. The Australian Capital Territory was carved out of New South Wales in 1911 to hold Canberra, a capital invented as a compromise between Sydney and Melbourne. The Northern Territory was run by South Australia until it was handed to the Commonwealth, also in 1911. The Jervis Bay Territory — about 70 square kilometres — was annexed in 1915 for the single reason that the landlocked Capital Territory needed a stretch of coast. Beyond the mainland lie seven external territories: Norfolk Island, Christmas Island, the Cocos (Keeling) Islands, Ashmore and Cartier Islands, the Coral Sea Islands, Heard Island and McDonald Islands, and the Australian Antarctic Territory.

A territory is not a state

The distinction is not cosmetic. Under section 122 of the Constitution, the Commonwealth Parliament can legislate directly for a territory and override its laws — something it cannot do to a state. It has used that power: the 1997 Euthanasia Laws Act struck down the Northern Territory’s Rights of the Terminally Ill Act, the world’s first voluntary-assisted-dying law, and barred the territories from legislating on the subject until that ban was repealed in 2022. Norfolk Island lost its long-standing self-government the same way, abolished by the Commonwealth in 2015.

The biggest thing Australia governs is frozen

The Australian Antarctic Territory covers about 5.9 million square kilometres — roughly 42% of Antarctica, and the largest claim any nation makes on the continent. It is bigger than the mainland of Australia itself. Britain transferred it in 1933, yet only four other countries — New Zealand, the United Kingdom, France and Norway — recognise the claim, and the 1959 Antarctic Treaty holds all such claims in abeyance. Australia administers a territory larger than the country, on a continent where sovereignty is, by treaty, suspended.

Down to the last sandbar

At the other end of the scale are the specks. Heard Island, uninhabited and subantarctic, carries Big Ben — an active volcano whose summit, Mawson Peak, rises higher than Mount Kosciuszko on the mainland. The Coral Sea Islands are reefs and cays spread across roughly 780,000 square kilometres of ocean, with a population of about four, all of them staffing a weather station. The Cocos (Keeling) Islands were run almost as a private estate by the Clunies-Ross family until Australia bought them out in 1978. Each of these counts for exactly as much, in the tally of territories, as the slice of Antarctica.

Ask how many states Australia has, and the answer is a tidy six. Ask how much of the world Australia governs, and the map runs from a 70-square-kilometre bay to nearly half of Antarctica.

Can you name them by shape?

Eight Australian outlines — the six states plus the two mainland territories — shown as silhouettes only. The five answer choices each time are drawn from all sixteen states and territories, islands and Antarctic claim included, so a wrong pick is easy to make.