31 Daniel Arribas-Bel 2008 Australian urban system, Zipf’s Law, Gibrat’s Law, ESDA <p>Australia conforms a unique urban system. This paper examines the Australian urban system using data for urban centres and localities in 1996 and 2001. A summary and a basic descriptive analysis of the database is provided, followed by an examination of whether the system follows Zipf’s and Gibrat’s laws. The latter is found to hold for all but one of the especifiactions used while the former does not seem to apply. A Exploratory Spatial Data Analysis (ESDA) as well as a confirmatory analysis are carried out to analyize the spatial dimension of city size and growth, finding no relation for the former but a significant one for the latter. </p>