If you want to know the REAL reason for the difference in size, it's the weather. Us poor b****y Poms/Limeys think that our weather is so cold and miserable that we don't need fridges to keep everything cold. Consequently, your average english fridge is not only smaller, but set to keep everything about the temperature of the cold water tap.

Having no choice but to benefit from the Oztralian experience, I now appreciate things like frozen lettuce, ice cold water (so that you can't taste all the rubbish they put in it, allegedly for our health).

But then, of course, one has to ask why the Americans manage to use a different size of paper from the rest of the civilised world...