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I had to look up Lingiari to see that it was an electoral division. It’s huge, and yet the least populated division? I can’t believe that the middle of your continent is so…empty.
Yeah the Northern Territory is about 150k people and electorates are supposed to be about 120k people. So it can either be one overpopulated electorate or 2 underpopulated ones. They went with two, and one of them is basically just Darwin. Lingiari is everything else.
It's incredibly sparse in the interior. Durack is the biggest electorate, covering a huge chunk of Western Australia. It would be in the top 20 largest countries in the world if it were a country, bigger than Peru or South Africa. And it has less than 120k people.
I grew up in the outback, and unless you've lived there you just can't understand it. You have to do pretty much everything for yourself, because there's so few people around you to trade with to do it for you. Our closest neighbour was 40km away, the nearest town was 60km (and was just a few hundred people). Even the mailbox at our front gate was a 10km drive. Our farm was 2.5x the size of Manhattan, and it was one of the smaller ones in the area. The distances are just vast.
Question- do you tend to have large extended families on the farm, with maybe a hired laborer or two, or is it a one nuclear family plus a ranch hand operation?
It seems like this is set up for sons to live at home with their mail order brides well into adulthood, but it also seems like Australia has a culture not-particularly conducive to that.
One nuclear family, no employees, and the kids move to the city when they grow up.
What that means of course is that an incredibly empty part of the country is steadily becoming even emptier. For example this region of South Australia, more than double the size of Italy, with just 2573 people, and losing about 3% of their population each year.
Edit: Last year this property larger than Palestine sold for $34 million, or about $21 million in US dollars.
It looks like that big area of SA is about 8000 people if you add back the two enclaves which are small towns with independent municipalities. Still scary. The most remote place I have been is a tossup between the drive to the Grand Canyon North Rim and the drive through the Scottish Highlands from Fort William to Skye Bridge. In both cases you go about 30 miles between settlements, and the settlements have populations in the low three figures.
Are the jobs that the missing people used to do (presumably, mostly running sheep stations) being automated away so that the agricultural productivity of the Outback is holding up, or are they just not being done any more?
Mostly the former. Agriculture has steadily gotten more and more capital intensive and less and less labour intensive in all kinds of ways. It used to be you had to muster cattle on horseback, then people started doing it by helicopter, now people are starting to do it with drones.
There is also an effect from increasing environmental regulations and aboriginal native title stuff making either certain areas or certain management practices not viable, but the technology factor dominates. Production keeps going up overall.
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