[Acajack]

The mythical Australian Dream is a house on a “quarter acre block”, as they call it. What’s that? 10,000 square feet about?

Not too many of those lots around in the suburbs of the larger Australian cities anymore. I think they are building on lots similar to what you described for Ottawa: between 3500 sq ft up to maybe 5000 sq ft for a McMansion (they use the term there as well). Which means that some of these palatial homes don’t even have much of backyard for the kids to take advantage of all that great weather. A big issue in Oz is also homes that are built without eaves. Lots of houses are built without eaves because they count in the width of the house. Leave the eaves off and you can build even closer to the property line.

Regarding heating: central heating doesn’t really take up that much space when you think about it. For what’s it’s worth, central heating is rare down there (non-existent from Sydney northwards in fact). Even in cooler places like Canberra (the coldest city in the country – and it’s milder than Victoria) and Melbourne it’s quite rate. My parents had friends who went there to work at the Canadian embassy and they had a hard time finding a house with central heating, even though the mercury does drop below freezing at night in Canberra a few times during each winter.