Our deserts in the USA are *much* smaller in area. Even in Death Valley you’re a short drive away from well-watered areas. If you’re in the middle of the Great Sandy Desert you have a *long* way to go to get to anywhere that isn’t desert. Even this doesn’t convey the distribution of population. The bulk of the Australian population lives in a handful of urban/suburban clusters of a few million people each, and in those clusters the population density is comparable to the conurbations of southern California; so the population density of rural and remote Australia is much lower still than what you would guess from taking population divided by area. Yeah, I lived in Kalgoorlie for 2 years. The relatively few people who live there would pack up shop and leave if it weren’t for the mining industry. The same thing happened to the once “dynamic” towns of Kambalda, Meekatharra and Wittenoom (amongst others) where the original mining towns were replaced by FIFO workforces, or the mines were phased out.
Most of the WA interior is an aggressively bad place to live, nor is there enough water supply to support large scale agriculture. Low-density livestock grazing is about all that the land is good for. Seems like you need to work on the fringes of your existing forests, to try to reclaim grasslands into woods. Trees create conditions more favorable to bringing rains, so with heavier woods, you might be able to start causing rainwater to pile up in more lakes. It is something they have experimented with in North Dakota and some parts of Africa, and it has show to yield increases in rainwater. They think it has something to do with the way trees trap and radiate heat.
Slightly off topic but it has always been my ambition to visit Australia. It seems to be a country of rich abundance of unique forms of life and diverse areas of interest and having read this most excellent article. It has only served to reinforce my desire to see this one time in my life… now I just have to win the lottery to get there.
If Dubai was built in the middle of a desert, then what makes most of Australia uninhabitable?
Dubai isn’t in the middle of a desert and Australia isn’t mostly uninhabitable.
Australia has been inhabited for tens of thousands of years. It would be more correct to say that the interior is unlikely to be inhabited by large numbers of people.
Comparing Australia to the UAE, or to Israel or the western United States for that matter, is pointless.
The UAE and Israel are tiny. The former is slightly smaller than the U.S. state of Maine. The latter is less than twice the size of the Sydney metropolitan area, and is smaller than Anna Creek Station in South Australia.
Australia is similar in area to the conterminous United States, but…
Las Vegas is a scant 435 km by road from Los Angeles and Phoenix is only 600 km distant. I can drive north from Perth non-stop and still be in Western Australia nearly a day-and-a-half later.
Then there is the problem of water.
Vegas has this bad boy 50 km away:
^Hoover Dam and Lake Mead, Colorado River, AZ/NV border
and Phoenix has this guy, about 100 km to its northeast:
^Theodore Roosevelt Dam, Salt River, AZ
Kalgoorlie, a town of about 30,000 in Western Australia’s eastern goldfields:
has been getting its water from the Perth hills, 600 km to the west, since 1903:
^Mundaring Weir, Helena River. Hasn’t spilled since 1996.
There is something of a dearth of rivers in Australia’s interior (apologies to those who have seen the graphic before):
And the deserts are almost continental in scale:
Still, about 85% of the country has been put to some sort of use:
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