Australia

Furthermore, Australia and Antarctica are dissimilar to other land masses; their shapes are not rough triangles with apexes pointing southward like South America, Africa, and the Indian subcontinent, Gondwanaland's other constituent parts. However, like its sister continents, Australia is composed of three structural units. These include in Western Australia a stable and ancient block of basement rock or craton as geologists call it, an ancient fold mountain belt (the Great Dividing Range along the east coast), and a flat platform-like area in-between composed of crystalline or folded rocks overlaid by flat-lying or only gently deformed sediments.

Millions of years of erosion have scoured Australia's surface features. One notable exception to Australia's flat topography is the Great Dividing Range stretching 1,200 mi (1,931 km) along Australia's east coast. The Great Dividing Range was thrust up by geological folding like the Appalachian Mountains in the eastern United States. The mountains are superimposed on larger geological structures including the Tasman and Newcastle geosynclines, troughs of older rocks upon which thick layers of sediment have been deposited. Those sediments in turn have been transformed by folding as well as magmatic and volcanic forces.