G8 Australia / The Size and the Emptiness

Why the middle stays empty, and what is out there anyway.

The interior is not a void, but it is dry, and dryness sets the terms.

The interior is often described as empty, which is a lazy word for it. A better description is that it is dry, and that dryness rations everything else. Rainfall across much of the inland is low and, more importantly, unreliable. A district might receive a decent total in one year and almost nothing for several years afterwards. Agriculture in that setting means running very few animals over very large areas, or nothing at all. Towns need a reason to exist, and where there is no dependable water, no port and no ore body, no reason presents itself.

What is out there is worth knowing about even if you never go. There are pastoral holdings measured in units that would count as districts elsewhere. There are mining operations that fly their workforce in and out on rosters rather than building permanent towns. There are conservation reserves of enormous size. There are roadhouses that function as the only fuel, food and phone signal for hours in any direction. And there are long stretches of stony plain, spinifex country, salt lake and dune field that are ecologically rich in ways that are not obvious at highway speed.

The emptiness also shapes how the rest of the country thinks about itself. A great deal of national imagery comes from the inland even though very few people live there. The colours in the tourism posters, the red earth and the hard light, belong to a part of the continent that most residents visit rarely or never. It is a curious arrangement: a coastal, suburban population that identifies strongly with a landscape it experiences mostly through a windscreen or a screen.