Australia is the sixth biggest country on Earth — about 7.7 million square kilometres — but if you look at a night map, almost all the lights are squeezed around the edges. Almost ninety percent of Australians live near the coast, while the giant middle sits almost empty. Why?
A Giant Country with an Empty Centre
The middle of Australia is called the Outback. It covers about seventy percent of the whole continent, yet it holds less than five percent of the people — under eight hundred thousand people in an area bigger than most countries.
The Middle Is Mostly Desert
Most of the centre is desert — the Great Sandy Desert, the Great Victoria Desert and the Simpson Desert, huge seas of red sand. Australia is the driest inhabited continent on Earth, and more than two thirds of the country gets less than five hundred millimetres of rain a year. The centre gets the least of all.
No Water Means No Big Cities
In the middle, heat can pass forty-five degrees, rivers dry up for most of the year, and the soil is too poor and dry for farms. Without reliable water you cannot grow food or build a big city, so the Outback has only tiny towns and cattle stations, often hundreds of kilometres apart.
The Edges Have Rain, Farms and Ports
The edges are completely different. Winds from the ocean bring rain to the coast, and in the east the Great Dividing Range mountains trap that rain, making green farmland. Early settlers arrived by ship, so the big cities grew at ports — Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide — and most Australians still live near them today.
The Desert Said No First
So Australians did not abandon the middle — the desert said no first. And the kangaroos? They got a continent-sized backyard all to themselves!
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