https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnB_8Zm9lPk


Of all the world's continents, Australia may be the smallest but it's also the only one to be entirely controlled by just a single country.

Almost everybody knows though that while Australia is a huge place in terms of land, it's also a pretty small place in terms of population.

But few people really understand the absolute scale of how sparsely populated the Australian continent actually is.

To help put the numbers into some perspective, Australia is of a comparable size to the lower 48 US states. These 48 US states have a population of more than 300 million people while Australia only has a population of a little more than 26 million.

This means that there are two American states that have more people than the entirety of the Australian continent. California, with more than 39 million and Texas with more than 28 million.

For a more European perspective, the population of only England, without factoring in any of the rest of the UK is more than double the entire population of Australia.

Despite being an entire continent, there are actually seven significantly smaller islands across the world that have higher populations than Australia.
Great Britain, of course, along with Honshu, Luzon, Mindanao, Java, Sumatra and Madagascar.

Java alone has nearly six times Australia's tiny population, despite being an island that is 60 times smaller than the Australian Continent.

But it still gets even crazier because there's also a bunch of cities across the world that right now that has more people than the entire continent as well.

Tokyo, Jakarta and Delhi metropolitan areas all have greater populations than the entirety of Australia, while Shanghai and Seoul metro areas have roughly similar populations.

Sao Paulo, Mexico City, New York City, Cairo, Lagos, Mumbai and Moscow all have largely comparable metropolitan populations to Australia as well and all things considered, Australia really only has five actual major cities across their continent Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide, which collectively account for the residences of nearly two out of every three Australians.
Australia is therefore among the most heavily urbanized nations in the world, with the overwhelming majority of the population around 90% concentrated into relatively small urban areas that only account for 0.22% of Australia's total land area with half of the overall population living within just these red areas and the other half almost entirely living in these blue areas.

Overall, around 85% of all Australians live within just 50.
Kilometres of the coastline meaning that there's hardly anyone deeper into the continent's vast Interior.

This unique population distribution creates a lot of fascinatingly bizarre situations across the continent. For example, this is the Shire of East Pilbara in Western Australia. It is roughly the same size as Japan, but there's only a bit more than 10,000 people who live here and half of them just live right here in the town of Newman. It's basically just a small town, but with the space of Japan.
Then, perhaps even more strangely, there's the pastoral unincorporated area down here in South Australia. This dot is the city of Adelaide, Australia's fifth largest city, home to more than 1.3 million people. And immediately adjacent to this oasis of urban life is the pastoral, unincorporated area, a territory that's roughly the size of France but is only home to a whopping 3750 people making the population density something like 178 square kilometres of land for every one person.
That is roughly one Aruba's worth of land for every single resident inside of the pastoral unincorporated area.
Then there's also Anna Creek right over here.
This is a huge territory that's slightly larger than Israel and yet it isn't a country or even a governmental entity at all.
Anna Creek is actually just a privately owned cattle ranch, the largest cattle ranch found anywhere in the world by far that is only staffed by eight full time employees, according to Wikipedia.
So this entire area that's the size of Israel is usually only home to less than a dozen people and about 10,000 cows.
Australia is really, really, really empty.

And to hammer the point home even further, consider the towns of Esperance on the south coast and Kununurra near to the north coast. Both of these towns are within the same state of Western Australia and it takes at least 35 hours of time to drive. From one to the other across a distance of more than 3200 kilometers.
Along that entire distance and time, you'll maybe only Drive through a population of less than 70,000 people the entire way.

For comparison, this drive would be about the same time and distance as driving from Madrid to Istanbul across nearly the whole of Europe where there would be a lot more than 70,000 people.



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Wish it was written here

Australia na desert naa

SanctifiedSista:
Wish it was written here

Here is what is written

Part I
Why is 95 percent of Australia empty?
HistoricalPlay.com
Almost everyone is aware that while Australia is a huge place in terms of land, it’s also a pretty small place in terms of population, but few people truly understand the absolute scale of how sparsely populated the australian continent actually is to help put the numbers into some perspective, Australia is of a comparable size to t

With a population of just over 26 million in Australia and these 48 U.S. states having a combined population of more than 300 million, only two American states, California and Texas, have a larger population than the entire continent of Australia. For a more European perspective, the population of just England, excluding the rest of the United Kingdom, is more than twice the population of the entire continent of Africa.

Despite being an island that is 60 times smaller than Australia the continent, great britain, honshu, luzon, mindanao, java, sumatra, and madagascar java alone has nearly six times Australia’s tiny population. But it gets even stranger because there are a number of cities around the world that currently have more people than the entire continent. The tokyo jakarta, and delhi metropolitan areas all have greater populations than the continent. New York, Mexico City, and Sao Paulo

All things considered, Australia truly only has five major cities on its continent: Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, and Adelaide, which together house approximately two out of every three Australians. City cairo, lagos, mumbai, and moscow all have similar metropolitan populations to Australia as well. As a result, Australia is one of the most urbanised countries in the world, with 90% of the population living in a tiny number of densely populated metropolitan regions that make up only 0.22 percent of the country’s total geographical area. These red areas are home to half of the country’s inhabitants.

and the other half almost entirely living in these blue areas overall, about 85% of all Australians reside within just 50 kilometres of the coastline, meaning that there is hardly anyone deeper into the vast interior. This unusual population distribution results in a number of fascinatingly bizarre situations across the continent. For instance, this is the shire of East Pilpara in Western Australia; it is roughly the same size as Japan.

Part II

It’s actually just a small town with the space of Japan, but there are only slightly more than 10,000 people who live here, and half of them only reside in Newman. Perhaps even stranger, there is the pastoral unincorporated area down here in South Australia. With more than 1.3 million residents, Adelaide is Australia’s fifth-largest city. Immediately surrounding this oasis of urban life is the pastoral unincorporated area, a region about the size of France.

but is only home to a meagre 3,750 residents, making the population density something like 178 square kilometres of land for every single person, or roughly one aruba’s worth of land for every single resident inside of the pastoral unincorporated area. Then there is also anna creek right over here, which is a huge territory that is slightly larger than israel.

anna creek isn’t a nation or even a governmental organisation; rather, it is the largest privately owned cattle ranch in the entire world, according to wikipedia, and it only employs eight full-time workers. As a result, in this area the size of Israel, there are typically only a few people living there, along with about 10,000 cows. Consider the towns of Esperance on the south coast and Kunanura close to the north coast, both of which are located in the same state of Western Australia, to drive home the point even further.

and it takes at least 35 hours to travel between them over a distance of more than 3 200 kilometres. Additionally, throughout that period, you may only pass by a population of less than 70 000 people. For contrast, the entire trip would take roughly the same amount of time and space as travelling across practically all of Europe from Madrid to Istanbul, where there would be much more than 70 000 people.

Then why is Australia so devoid of people generally, and what is it about this continent that has allowed everything I just said to be possible? While there is some truth to this line of thinking, I am here to argue with you that that’s only a small part of the overall population puzzle in Australia. After all, everyone knows that Australia is covered in a big old desert with tonnes of super dangerous animals and insects who would ever want to actually live in most of the country.

and the full explanation for why there are so few people on this continent is generally quite complex. Most of the issue comes from the fact that Australia is pretty particularly cursed from a geologic and geographic perspective because it is situated close to the frozen continent of Antarctica, and its western side is constantly battered by cold ocean currents coming up from the southern ocean, meaning that there isn’t enough heat.

Across the vastness of Australia’s interior to the west, a so-called “rain shadow” is cast by the country’s fifth-longest mountain range, which runs down the eastern side of the country from north to south. This mountain range’s height prevents many pacific rain clouds from moving further into Australia than the immediate and narrow band of land between the mountains and the coastline.

However, from a worldwide perspective, these mountains aren’t all that spectacular. In fact, there are no very large mountains in Australia, and the continent as a whole has the lowest average elevation of all the continents, which makes rainfall a far bigger issue. Here, within the Great Dividing Range, Mount Kosciuszko is the tallest mountain and highest point that can be found anywhere in mainland Australia. It is just 2228 metres above sea level, in contrast, every other inhabited continent’s highest point is at least twice that height.

So what is it about Australia that makes it such an overall empty void of people?

What is it about this continent that has made everything I just brought up possible? Well, the easy answer that I'm sure most of you are thinking right now is the desert.
Duh, everybody knows that Australia is covered in a big old desert with tons of super dangerous animals and insects.
Who would ever want to actually live in most of the country? And while there is some truth to this line of thinking, I'm here to argue with you that that's only a small part of the overall population puzzle in Australia and the full explanation for why there are so few people on this continent is overall a pretty complicated one.

Most of the problem stems from the fact that Australia Is pretty uniquely cursed when it comes to both a geologic and location perspective. Located relatively close by to Antarctica (the frozen continent), the western side of Australia, is continuously battered by cold ocean currents coming up from the Southern Ocean, which means that there simply isn't enough heat to generate large scale evaporation that's necessary to form rain clouds over much of the west.
Meanwhile, in the east, the great dividing range is Australia's largest and longest chain of mountains and the fifth longest anywhere in the world.
These mountains run down the entire eastern side of the continent from north to south, and their height denies many rain clouds advancing from the Pacific the ability to move any further into Australia than the immediate and narrow band of land between the mountains and the coastline. Thus, a so called rain shadow is cast by these mountains across the vastness of the Australian interior to the west where moisture coming in from the east understandably struggles to penetrate into.
But these mountains, generally speaking from a global perspective, aren't really all that impressive.

Truly big mountains cannot be found anywhere on the surface of Australia and overall, the continent has the lowest average elevation of all of Earth's continents, which just creates a further huge problem for rainfall.



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The tallest mountain and highest point that can be found anywhere in mainland Australia is here within the Great Dividing Range (Mount Kosciuszko) and it's only 2228 metres high above sea level.
For comparison, the highest point of every single other inhabited continent is at least more than double that height, and nearly three fourths of the entire US state of Colorado alone maintains an elevation that is significantly higher than just that one sword of tall mountain in Australia. This means that there are simply very few tall mountains to be found anywhere on the continent that are actually capable of forcing air upwards where it's possible to cool into rain and then to make natters even worse, that air is very often just too hot for rain to form anyway because the continent straddles the boundary of the Tropic of Capricorn, placing a significant amount of northern Australia to be well within the tropics and almost the rest of the continent down in the subtropics.
This area of the world is dominated by the subtropical high pressure belt that wraps around the entire globe and it simultaneously serves to both warm and dry the air around it. So whatever air that gets pushed up by the few tall mountains in Australia has to also contend with this phenomenon and what's even more? Australia has to also contend with the difficult to predict oscillations of the Southern Pacific Ocean, known as El Nino and La Nina.

During an El Nino event which can sometimes last for years at a time, the Southern Pacific often goes through prolonged periods of slower than usual westerly winds and that naturally means that there will be less atmospheric moisture delivered by those winds to the eastern and northern parts of the Australian continent. Often accompanied by exacerbated drought like conditions, It's unsurprising then that many of the worst bushfires in Australia's history have taken place at the exact same time as during one of these El Nino events.

All of these factors converge to make Australia by far the driest inhabited continent on the earth with the least amount of average annual rainfall and consequently desert or desert like conditions. understandably exist over about 30. 5% of the continent's total area.
I mean, just take a look at this map of Australia's average rates of annual rainfall where you can see most of the rain on the continent falls on the east coast in the stretch of land between the coastline and the Great Dividing Range in the north that stretches into the tropics, tasmania in the south and around Perth in the southwest corner. It's basically an identical map with Australia's current population density pattern except in one very interesting and notable area, northern Australia.



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Tropic of Capricorn, Lagos, Java.

The problem up here is not that it receives a low amount of rain on average but that it receives that rain largely all at once and over ridiculously variable periods of time.
Just like everywhere else in the tropics, northern Australia is dominated by the wet and the dry season where rainfall is greater during the summer and less during the winter. In the case of Darwin, the largest city up here on Australia's northern coast, the average annual rainfall amount is more than 1800 millimetres, which is nearly triple the amount of rainfall that London gets.
However, the vast majority of that rain falls during just the four months of the wet season between december and march when the area's monsoons and tropical cyclones are generally active and when you discount the immediate coastline, the rest of northern Australia and the interior between the coast and the north and the Tropic of Capricorn in the south suffers from some of the most highly erratic rainfall seen anywhere on the planet, largely owing to the unpredictable pattern of the area's tropical cyclones back in 1898.
One of these cyclones dumped an absolutely unbelievable 740 millimetres of rain over this small northern Australian town in just a single day, more than the entire average annual rainfall of London which could give the false impression if you just looked at that single year of more rainfall here than in the UK. But then a few decades later on in 1924, without any cyclones penetrating through to the interior here, this town only received four millimetres of rain throughout the whole year which is even less than the yearly average of the Sahara Desert.
But it's not just the erratic nature of the continent's rainfall that makes fresh water a scarcity here, it's also the lack of any decently large rivers. The most significant river system on the continent is the Murray Darling Basin here in the southeast in one of Australia's most heavily populated cores. But it just kind of sucks from a built up civilisation perspective. First of all, the waters of the system flow south westward and empty out right here on the south coast. This isn't really good because as mentioned previously, most of this basin exists in the part of Australia beyond the Great Dividing Range that doesn't usually see a lot of rainfall to replenish the rivers with water as a result, the average annual flow of the waters in the basin amounts to just 24,000 gigalitres a year which is the lowest rate of flow of any of the world's greatest river systems.
For comparison, the Mississippi basin in the United States has an average annual flow of nearly 530,000 gigalitres a year which is more than 22 times the flow of water that Australia's greatest river system got.
Nonetheless, it's the best that the continent has got and the basin provides the drinking water for around 3 million Australians today while the area around it has developed into the agricultural heartland of the modern Australian nation providing nearly the entirety of the food that the 26 million people of Australia consume along with enough to export to millions more across Asia.
But as climate change continues to worsen the effects of drought in the continent, the waters that feed this agricultural heartland through the Murray-Darling Basin are getting harder and harder to come by.
With every passing decade, nine of the ten hottest recorded years in the continent's history have taken place just since 2005. These higher temperatures are rapidly increasing the rates of evaporation throughout the waters of the basin and with already limited rainfall throughout the majority of it. It's making the water here increasingly scarce with some sections of the basin at times remaining completely dry for months on end and it's not just the scarcity of fresh water on the continent that makes sustaining a very large population difficult, it's also the scarcity of good land for farming and agriculture, owing once again largely to geography, geology and location.



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In northern Australia, there hasn't been any new mountain building since the Precambrian era that ended one and one half billion years ago and even further, there hasn't been any glacial activity here since the carboniferous ended nearly 300 million years ago. Thus, this entire region that covers nearly half of the continent has suffered it's soils being beneath continuous weathering and erosion for well over 250 million years compared to less than 10,000 years for most of the soils on other continents like North America, Europe or Asia. Therefore, the soil nearly everywhere in northern Australia. Just sucks for agriculture, the only exception to that rule is the area of the river basin that drains here into Lake Erie. But this is an overall small amount of the north and the rainfall required for irrigation here is still very low. But the thing is, none of these geographic or climatic explanations really give the full picture because despite everything that I just spent the last 10 minutes explaining to you, it turns out that Australia actually has a ton of fresh water resources. Well, at least when compared to countries and not two continents.
In fact, Australia has an estimated 492 cubic. Kilometres worth of renewable freshwater resources, which is more than a lot of countries with significantly higher populations. That's twice as much as Pakistan for example, a country which has more than eight times as many people. So it's not just a sheer lack of freshwater and it's not just a sheer lack of arable land either. While yeah, only about. 6% of Australia's land is actually arable and suitable for agriculture, Australia is huge so that 6% is still a ton of usable farmland.
To put it in a context, Australia has more arable land than Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos all have combined despite all of these countries having a combined population of 542 million people and Australia only having 26 million people.
To put it into another perspective, Australia has by far the highest ratio in the entire world of arable land to population at around 1.9 arable hectares of land for every one citizen of the country.
For the sake of comparison, the ratio. In the United States is only about 0.47 arable hectares of land per one citizen. This means that if Australia ever reached the same ratio of arable land to people as the United States, the continent would be home to well over 90 million people. Still substantially less than the population of America but also substantially more people than Australia has today.
In theory, Australia does have enough space and resources to support a lot more people than the 26 million who live there today.
The big reason why it doesn't is because for pretty much the entire history of Australia right up until the present day, it's just been a really tough place for anyone to actually get to. You see, for millions of years now, Australia has been effectively a lost continent isolated from all the Earth's other major landmasses drifting alone out in the sea.
This has resulted in millions of years of completely separate evolution for the animals of the continent which is why Australia is unique among earth's continents for the fact that marsupials and not placental mammals dominate the indigenous mammal wildlife species.
Modern humans first reached the continent sometime around 50,000 years ago when the area's geography looked radically different than it does today.
With sea levels significantly lower back then, humans were able to simply walk down the Sunda Peninsula, hop across just a few islands and then make it into present day New Guinea, which back then was connected to Australia via a land bridge as the prehistoric continent of Sahel and after these initial humans made it to the continent, they remained almost entirely undisturbed for tens of thousands of years by any other groups of humans from anywhere in the outside world.




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As sea levels began to rise following the end of the last ice age, Sahul was flooded and the land bridge between New Guinea and Australia fell beneath the waves around 10,000 years ago making Australia even more remote than it had been previously and even less likely to ever be visited by outsiders.
For the next 9600 years before the eventual arrival of the Europeans in the 17th century, the Australian continent may have only been significantly visited and impacted by outside humans, a total of just two times.
Dingoes, an invasive species of dog likely originating from New Guinea were introduced to Australia sometime around 8300 years ago potentially by an unknown group of human visitors coming from the island.
About 11% of the modern aboriginal Australian (indigenous Australians) DNA also derives from Indians which suggests a potential encounter on the continent with a group of humans from South Asia sometime around 4000 years ago and then, after a millennial of existing almost entirely undisturbed by the outside world, in 1606 a Dutchman and his crew suddenly showed up on their ships and landed right here on the western side of the Cape York Peninsula.

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But even after that, the Dutch never really bothered to ever establish any permanent settlements or presence on the continent because the parts of it that they found were generally decided to be too uninhabitable for all the reasons that I mentioned during the first half of this video.

The closest the Dutch ever came to a permanent settlement on Australia happened entirely by accident. 50 years after their discovery in 1656, a Dutch ship called the Vergulde Draeck crashed off the coast of western Australia around here.
75 of the ship's survivors miraculously made it to the shore and then seven of them were dispatched on one of the ship's lifeboats to make the 1400 mile long journey over to Batavia or modern day Jakarta on the island of Java which was the administrative capital of colonial Dutch rule in Indonesia at the time.
After 41 gruelling days of travel, these seven people finally made it to Batavia and raised the alarm for the 68 crew and passengers who they had left behind back in Australia and for the next several years, numerous search and rescue missions were carried out by the Dutch navy all along the western Australian coast.


Did the rescue teams find the 68 crew and passengers? Find out on pg 8.
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But little sign of the ships wreckage was ever discovered and the 68 survivors of the Draeck who were left behind were simply never seen or heard from again.
Their ultimate fates remaining a mystery to this day, they simply vanished into the vast void of Australia and history without much of a trace.
More than three centuries of time would pass before finally in 1963, the wreckage of the Vergulde Draeck was discovered by a team of Australian divers roughly100 Kilometres north of modern day Perth.
Well over a century after the vanishing of the Vergulde Draeck 68 on the continent, the British finally established the first truly permanent European settlement on Australia only in 1788 over on the complete other side of the continent around modern day Sydney with around 1300 people at the time.
The Aboriginal (indigenous people of Australia, they have now been subjugated) population of the continent was likely only somewhere around 650,000, which was pretty much the entire population of Australia as a whole(the westerners eventually displaced the indigenous population to become the majority).
To put that in a perspective, every other inhabited continent on the planet had vastly vastly more people than that.
Back in 1788, Asia already had more than 650 million people, around 1000 times the population of Australia while Europe had nearly 150 million, Africa had 85 million and the Americas had around 20 million.
Australia therefore began the modern era of industrialisation from a far, far lower population base than any other of Earth's inhabited continents and since population growth tends to be exponential, Australia has been lagging behind the rest for centuries.
In 1788, the population of the freshly independent United States (British colony at that time, the indigenous population was dominated by the western occupiers. These westerners rebelled against the British crown and also displaced the indigenous population to become the major demographic) stood at around 4 million people.
It would take Australia more than a century of history, not until the year 1906 to finally surpass the population of the United States back in 1788, and by 1906, America's population was already pushing 90 million.
For most of Australia's history, immigration came almost entirely from just a single source the British Isles.
Following the discovery of gold on the continent in 1851, a massive gold rush to Australian ensued that saw around 2% of the entire population of the British Isles emigrate to Australia throughout the decade of the 1850s and more than doubled the Australian population almost overnight.



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But Australia struggled to attract large numbers of immigrants from Europe afterwards because it was heavily competing for them with more attractive countries in the Americas, like the United States, Canada, Brazil and Argentina who were much closer to Europe geographically and were thus, generally cheaper and quicker for Europeans to emigrate to.
It didn't help that beginning in 1901, the Australian government enacted a policy that would artificially reduce the numbers of immigrants to the continent.
For decades, the racist white Australia policy which restricted immigration to only people of white European ancestry and Initially gave overwhelming preference to migrants coming specifically from Britain. As a result, the flow of immigrants to the continent remained only a trickle of people for decades across the early 20th century while at the same time, millions of immigrants were arriving in the United states every couple of years.
The population of Australia even shrank during World War One when nearly one in five of Australia's men were shipped off to fight the war in Europe.
Around two and one half percent of Australia's entire male population of the time never made it back home from the trenches and beaches of Europe.
By the eve of World War Two, Australia was a small and overwhelmingly European nation of only around 7 million on the periphery of Asia and many white Australians of the time were terrified of being demographically overwhelmed by the extremely more populous nations of Asia just to the North.
By the time war came to the continent, Imperial Japan had more than ten times Australia's population and more than 73 million people.
After the Japanese bombed the northern Australian city of Darwin in 1942(let's not forget that the illegal western occupiers have the indigenous people of Australia under subjugation, even to this day), fears across the continent were rife that an imminent Japanese invasion was coming and while the invasion never actually materialised, the Australian Government nonetheless came to believe that they needed to increase their population to avoid the threat of another invasion scare like that again in the future. Before 1945, almost all the immigrants to Australia came from either Great Britain or Ireland but after the war, the policies restricting immigration largely only to Britons were gradually relaxed to be more inclusive of all Europeans and by the 1960s, 3 million mainland Europeans from places like the Baltic States, Poland, Italy, the Balkans and Greece packed up their bags and headed to Australia to begin a brand new life many of them being displaced refugees from the war.
But the exclusion of non-whites as immigrants to the continent remained largely in force for several more decades even after the war.
It wasn't until 1973, nearly three decades after the end of World War Two that the White Australia policy was rebranded.
Thank you so much for watching.

The end