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
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.
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