A rate quoted anywhere on these pages is a midpoint. Currencies trade at two prices at once, one at which the market will buy and one at which it will sell, and the midpoint sits between them. No retail transaction happens there. It is the honest baseline a quote is measured against, not a price on offer.
The order of the pair decides what the number means. The Australian dollar is conventionally quoted as the foreign-currency price of one Australian dollar, so a figure answers "how much of the other currency does one Australian dollar buy". Read the same pair the other way round and the number inverts. That is why a page saying 1 AUD buys X and a page saying 1 X buys some fraction of a dollar are the same fact stated twice, not two different rates.
Most currencies are not quoted against the Australian dollar at all. They are derived. The Reserve Bank publishes its US dollar rate as a mid-point observed at 4.00 pm Sydney time and calculates most other currencies by crossing that rate with mid-points quoted around the same time. It describes the result as indications of market value only, and notes that dealer quotations will differ.
A rate without a time is therefore a rate without a meaning. Currencies trade around the clock across time zones, so a quoted figure is a statement about one instant rather than about a day, and a published rate is properly a pair: the number, and the moment it belonged to.