I keep hearing that Australia’s population is so low due to uninhibitle land. Yet they have a very generous immigration attitude and there’s no child limit that I’m aware of. How can/does geography make any difference?
In: 1468
Much of the middle of the country is desert.
It’s very very dry and very very hot.
Some huge percentage of our population live on the eastern seaboard in major metropolitan cities.
There is into so many people we can jam into those cities.
We do have rural cities but population in them is,.comparatively, low.
Take a look at Coober pedy. It’s so hot there that they live underground.
Population is generally expressed as ‘so many thousands of people per unit of area’. When you live on a huge landmass, the centre of which is basically boiling desert and full of things that would kill you if you tried to live there, the sums will come out with a very small number even if your inhabited places are quite full.
If you have a desired skillset, it’s easy to immigrate. If you are an asylum seeker, not so much
Side note: It would be very hard to build cities like Sydey and Melbourne in the desert. But it’s not uninhabited!
Aboriginal people have lived across Australia for 60,000 years — [including the desert](https://theconversation.com/aboriginal-people-lived-in-australias-desert-interior-50-000-years-ago-earlier-than-first-thought-102111). They are able to do this through intense study of geography, climate, ecology, plants, and animals. This knowledge is part of the Aboriginal connection to land.
Natural population growth is somewhat limited since it takes time for babies to grow up and have kids of their own. Biologically (and societally) it was not uncommon for the average woman to have more than 6-7 children but that sort of appears to be the upper limit (it takes 9 months gestation and takes a toll on the human body etc). Even at those rates of fertility, infant mortality and poor healthcare means that populations rise at about 3-6% annually.
Today, there is no country that grows faster than 5% annually.
Consider also that nearly all the modern stuff we are used to were not widely available 100 years ago – especially things like medicine, modern fertilizers, wide spread electrification, easy transportation etc. These are all constraints on population growth since people die more often, food cannot be made available in remote locations etc etc.
Australia started with a low population, does not have lots of land (relative to the size) good for agriculture, has inhospitable climate and environment without technology.
First off, Australia does not have a generous immigration policy. If you are educated/rich enough to emigrate to Australia you have lots of better options.
Second off, Australia has relatively low birth rates.
Third off, the population is growing and has been since colonization.
Australia is a relatively young country so we haven’t had the opportunity/time to build a large population. Part of the problem here is that, as a develop country, we have a low birth rate. Finally, there is a lot (A LOT!) of habitable land along the coastline – geography is not the reason.
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Water. After the air you breathe you need water.
Without water you die quickly. Go into the Australian desert unprepared and you can be dead in hours.
Australia doesn’t have a lot of freshwater. Even the big cities in the temperate/sub-tropical regions like Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth have desalination plants. These cities are in “green” areas. The only places with abundant freshwater are north east Queensland (tropical seaside areas with a nice mountain range to dam) and the monsoon areas in the northern territory and far north of WA (Lake Argyle, The Kakadu).
North Queensland is decently settled, but suffers from Tropical Cyclones. It’s also full of scary shit like Coastal Taipains, Cassowarys, crocodiles and the worst of all, rural Queenslanders.
Northern Territory and the areas around Kununurra in northern Western Australia are similarly full of scary things and cyclones plus you get the monsoon which means months of challenges moving around. Plus there are two seasons in that area: Fucking hot and dry and fucking hot and wet. Oh, and the tidal range is 7 metres (23 feet in freedumb units).
I am not saying you can’t live in these areas, indigenous peoples did for millennia. That being said, there were still more of them on the coast than the desert.
In Western Australia, we built a dam on the Ord river for the purpose of agriculture and development, this reservoir became Lake Argyle. Second largest freshwater reservoir on the continent. It’s huge (and yes, there are freshwater crocodiles in it). It spawned a town to service the dam and the agriculture to follow.
The town is called Kununurra and has a population of 5,300. Mean minimum temperature is 21c (71F) and mean high is 35c (95f) maximum high is 45c (111f). It’s 3,000 km from the state capital Perth. It’s 800km from Darwin. Unsurprisingly, if you grow up there and don’t want to be a farmer or related you leave and don’t come back.
Back in the mid 2010s the government formed an infrastructure fund to try and get development moving in these areas. Put $5 billion AUD into the fund. Four fifths of fuck all happened with the money (it didn’t help that the government was dumb as fuck conservatives who blocked any renewables development with this money).
TLDR huge distances, lack of water, geography, weather and opportunity are all factors into why it’s tough to live here outside the established cities.
Does Australia actually have a very generous immigration attitude? I’ve generally seen that it is very hard to move to Australia. You can’t just pick up and move there if you feel like it.
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