Completely Free Dating Sites (International and Australian)
While the biggest (and usually best) dating sites do charge a fee for their premium services, there has been a recent boom in completely free dating sites. They offer many, if not all, of the profile and contact options that the paid sites do while never charging a cent.
So, how do they make their money, or at least break even? Usually by serving ads on their sites.
Plenty of Fish is the leader in this website genre. The owner of this site is a millionaire, apparently. Hundreds of thousands of people have signed up, with more joining all the time. The site gets so much traffic that he makes thousands of dollars a day just from people clicking on the Adsense ads. Ironically many of these ads are for paid dating sites!
There are other sites that use this model (or a similar one) to offer completely free dating. None are as big as Plenty of Fish yet, but some do have lots of members, a fair number of whom are in Australia. Oasis Active is a good example.
Some have an Australian version of the main site, like Connecting Singles Australia and Club Intimate Australia.
And it seems that some Aussies have gone down this path and have built completely free dating sites catering solely to their countrymen. Have a look at Singles Who Click, Hook Me Up, Dating Online and Next Wink.
There are sure to be more of these out there, and others on the way. I'll list them here as I find them.