• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2069 0

British, and who worked in a meat-processing factory, telling me that he and his mates occasionally dropped a gallbladder or two into boxes of frozen liver marked for export to Britain, and that his factory defined “lamb” as a sheep under six months old if it was destined for local consumption, but defined it as any sheep up to 18 months old if it was destined for export to Britain.) Today, Australia’s principal exports remain low-bulk, high-value items, including steel, minerals, wool, and wheat; increasingly within the last few decades, wine and macadamia nuts as well; and also some specialty crops that are bulky but that have high value because Australia produces unique crops aimed at specialty niche markets for which some consumers are willing to pay a premium, such as durum wheat and other special wheat varieties, and wheat and beef raised without pesticides or other chemicals.

But there is an additional tyranny of distance, one within Australia itself. Australia’s productive or settled areas are few and scattered: the country has a population only that of the U.S., scattered over an area equal to that of the U.S.’s lower 48 states. The resulting high costs of transportation within Australia make it expensive to sustain a First World civilization there. For example, the Australian government pays for telephone connection to the national phone grid for any Australian home or business at any location within Australia, even for outback stations hundreds of miles from the nearest such station. Today, Australia is the most urbanized country in the world, with 58% of its population concentrated in just five large cities (Sydney with 4.0 million people, Melbourne 3.4 million, Brisbane 1.6 million, Perth 1.4 million, and Adelaide 1.1 million as of 1999). Among those five cities, Perth is the world’s most isolated large city, lying farther than any other from the next large city (Adelaide, 1,300 miles to the east). It is no accident that two of Australia’s largest companies, its national airline Qantas and its telecommunications company Telstra, are based on bridging those distances.

Australia’s internal tyranny of distance, in combination with its droughts, is also responsible for the fact that banks and other businesses are closing their branches in Australia’s isolated towns, because those branches have become uneconomic. Doctors are leaving those towns for the same reason. As a result, whereas the U.S. and Europe have a continuous distribution of settlement sizes—large cities, medium-sized towns, and small villages—Australia is increasingly without medium-sized towns. Instead, most Australians today live either in a few large cities with all the amenities of the modern First World, or in smaller villages or else outback stations without banks, doctors, or other amenities. Australia’s small villages of a few hundred people can survive a five-year drought, such as arises often in Australia’s unpredictable climate, because the village has so little economic activity anyway. Big cities can also survive a five-year drought, because they integrate the economy over a huge catchment area. But a five-year drought tends to wipe out medium-sized towns, whose existence depends on their ability to provide enough business branches and services to compete with more distant cities, but which aren’t big enough to integrate over a huge catchment. Increasingly, most Australians don’t depend on or really live in the Australian environment: they live instead in those five big cities, which are connected to the outside world rather than to the Australian landscape.

Europe claimed most of its overseas colonies in hopes of financial gain or supposed strategic advantages. Locations of those colonies to which many Europeans actually emigrated—i.e., excluding trading stations where only relatively few Europeans settled in order to trade with the local population—were chosen on the basis of the land’s perceived suitability for the successful founding of an economically prosperous or at least self-supporting society. The unique exception was