Growing Up in Australia may be the most ambitious study of children's development ever undertaken in Australia. Tracking 5000 infants and 5000 four-year-olds forward over at least eight years, it aims to provide a strong evidence base for policy development and service delivery on a wide range of issues relating to children's development. Many parties have played important roles in bringing this study into the world, watching over it, helping it take its first steps, and offering expert advice and assistance. In this paper we first provide a brief description of the study's development process, using the rather appropriate analogy of a child's birth. Then we briefly describe the data that will be available to researchers from the first survey wave, and offer some pointers to the sorts of questions which can be addressed using the dataset.