Wales captain Sam Warburton insists that it is just a question of when, and not if, they beat a leading southern hemisphere side.
Wales outscored the Wallabies by four tries to three, but faultless flyhalf Bernard Foley kicked 18 points to guide Australia to a 10th consecutive victory over the Welsh.
Since taking charge of Wales in 2007, coach Warren Gatland has won only one of 26 matches against the three southern hemisphere giants, a 21-18 victory over Australia in 2008.
But he and Warburton were keen to focus on the positives following a ninth successive defeat by the Wallabies in single figures.
“It’s the best game we’ve started in November internationals or Six Nations in a quite a long while,” Warburton said after Rhys Webb opened the scoring in just the second minute of a first-half that saw each team notch up three converted tries.
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“We managed to match the intensity of Australia.
“Everyone knows in the squad and the management that we’ve got the ability to beat these teams. They’re not going to be consistently this close the next nine or 10 matches and not go our way one time, it’s a just a matter of when.”
Gatland added: “It’s frustrating. I’m not happy with the result, but I’m pretty happy with the performance.
“At the end of the day, we’ve missed two one-on-one tackles and they’ve scored and then we’ve thrown an intercept pass.
“In the short time we’ve had together, compared to a side that’s come out of the Rugby Championship, I thought we showed a huge amount of positives… there’s a lot of things to build on.”
Generally, Gatland said, the Welsh defence was “excellent”.
“Structurally we missed one tackle on (Michael) Hooper and one on (Tevita) Kuridrani and then Rhys (Webb) threw the (intercept) pass.
“We created a lot of things ourselves,” he said. “Four tries to three: we haven’t done that against one of these big teams for a while. We were comfortable with the ball.”
Gatland also predicted that Wales would improve, with a match against Fiji next week to be followed by a clash with world champions New Zealand and South Africa on consecutive weekends.
“I think we’ll get a lot better in the campaign,” the former Ireland and Wasps coach said, predicting “a big upward curve as a group and individuals”.
Gatland insisted that come the World Cup in England next year, when Wales are in the same pool as both Australia and the hosts, his side would be different from the one now.
“When we play Australia in the World Cup, it’ll be a different beast, a different animal that’ll be facing them in that pool game,” he said, adding that he would likely ring the changes for the Fiji game next Saturday.