I'm going to bounce around a bit, so stick with me...
To answer your last question, totally! You set the template under the options tab on the page or in the page list view at Content > Pages, you tick the box next to the page you want to change and then select "Set Template" from the "With Selected:" dropdown.
If the only reason you'd need additional templates is to use a different BG image on each page, then you can solve that issue either using CSS or a content block.
If you were going to use CSS, you could give the body of each page a unique id based on the page alias like so:
or you could use the page alias to give the div in question a unique id or add a unique class, doesn't really matter. Then in your CSS, if your page alias was for instance, "home" and you wanted the background image AU-bg.jpg to display as the body background, you would put the following in your CSS:
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body#home {background: #000000 url("../images/AU-bg.jpg") no-repeat top center;}
You can use the page alias body id to give your image links different CSS for the current page. For example, if I had the following two list items:
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<li class="homenav">Home</li>
<li class="aboutnav">About</li>
and I wanted the current page text to display as the color red, I could use the page alias that I set for the body id in the previous example to style my CSS like so:
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body#home li.homenav, body#about li.aboutnav {color:red;}
Get it?
If you don't want to use the page alias, you could also insert a content block into your template to put in the background image name or a class or whatever.
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<div class="{content block="Background Image Class" wysiwyg="false" oneline="true"}">
That'll give you a field called "Background Image Class" to fill out on each page. You could even give it some default content just in case you didn't fill it out on every page, or you could use a smarty conditional statement to only use the content block if it has content like this:
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{content block="Background Image Class" assign="image" wysiwyg="false" oneline="true"}
{if !empty($image)}
<div class="{$image}">
{else}
<div class="default">
{/if}
The global content blocks provide you with the tags to use them in your content - if I made a block named "Links" then I could place it in my template or page with
If you have multiple templates, it would be a good idea to put universal elements like your links in a GCB so you don't have to update each template each time you make a change.
I hope that's not too confusing.