@Smudger:
you don't know much about this so let me give you a basic rundown of how it is.
It's the entire basis of the term "outback" lol.
The coast obviously going to be most populated area, but that doesn't mean people don't settle further inland.
Only if there's something to settle around. Live river systems that trade can grow on, or fertile lands. Southeast Australia has some of that. But ain't nobody settling the giant desert badlands lol.
And this is down to how quickly the Aussies are pushing inland. See you have the housing boom slowly enveloping the farming belt, pushing the farmers further in amongst much larger territories. The end result is a huge percent of Australia becoming rooted amongst healthy soils able to sustain more than grass. The expansion the pat hundred years is just insane and is climbing rapidly.
And will end abruptly when they hit the infertile lands of those climates that you know, aren't farmable without some sort of moon technology.
Also the farther from the coast they are (which they are) the less profitable it would even be to try.
Australia does not have fertile steppes on the level of the US by any stretch of imagination.
The only thing holding us back is the water and aboriginal land which we cannot touch. But hey it's neat having large expanses of wilderness here. Who wants skyscrapers and Tarmac everywhere?
It's not just water lol. You're completely ignoring climate and vegetation. That interior isn't some Ohio land of empty fertility. It's not suitable for growing crops.
Why do you think aboriginal societies remained hunter-gatherer for so long? Actually maybe you shouldn't answer that.
As for water issues, well a great deal of it is from under the country itself.
So you could possibly water a city in the dead middle of Australia. Problem is that city still has no economic base to grow on lol.
There needs to be a reason for Australians to populate their interior, and it needs to make Benjamins, and further to the point it needs to be POSSIBLE.
But if you want to try and ride the whole 'arid/uninhabitable' argument then why not take a look at some of the places around the world that almost mimic this land. Vegas, dubai, Timbuktu etc. we have evolved far beyond these barriers.
Las Vegas, like virtually all of the American cities in the interior west were waystations to the West Coast. Las Vegas only became a real city in like the 50's and stuff, when car culture came up and people could drive in from California.
Dubai is on the water and is built on oil and information economy. It is easily accessible by water.
Timbuktu? Look at Timbuktu. Timbuktu is a dried up shithole. That's because it stopped mattering CENTURIES ago. It used to be that the way people traded between North Africa and West Africa could only be done by camel caravans through the Sahara. They didn't trade by boat. So cities sprang up on oasis's and rivers. Timbuktu is on a MAJOR river, the Niger. It was rich and powerful (as was the region) when all that trade existed.
Nowadays there is pretty much zero such trade, and the coast of West Africa is where the money is at.
Timbuktu. Lagos.
Hmm? I wonder which suggests a modern economy?
Australia hasn't even begun to tap its potential. Where as the states are slowly starting to run out of theirs.
What potential is in the outback lol. Is there some huge resource out there I'm missing that has hitherto been untapped? And that in the instance of discovery not lead to all of it being shipped out of the ports anyway? Which would mean your population would still remain clinging to the coast?
The US is too huge to run out of potential. My area has seen industries collapse decades ago leading to rotting cities like Bridgeport, and in the same time frame seen whole new cities rise up out of small towns into shiny nice places to live like Stamford or White Plains.
We don't run on one thing and never have.
Edit. To hell with it, my heart isn't in it this time. It should be simple enough to prove the point just by saying we have huge mineral deposits, renewable energy, clean water and technology available to us that removes the boundaries found a hundred years ago.
ahahaha, I forget if you still have troops with us in Afghanistan. But geography is still in charge boyo. Look no further than that war.
We can fight the land, tame the land, but never make irrelevant the land.
–- Update From New Post Merge ---
@wolfwoof:
Have a go at the Danes. I'll take Denmark for 500 Alex
Easy, they're the Scandinavians who were in charge of the Jutland peninsula and nearby territories. In contrast with youse two Norwegians and Swedes up on the main peninsula on either side of the mountains. A power base formed on the peninsula, probably due to being both a maritime gateway and a good maritime launch point, perfect for being vikings and centralizing some power. If I recall the Danes were mostly the dominant one among you for a long time.