of all the world's continents Australia may be the smallest but it's also the only one to be entirely controlled by just a single country almost everybody knows though that while Australia is a huge place in terms of land it's also a pretty small place in terms of population but few people really understand the absolute scale of how sparsely populated the Australian continent actually is to help put the numbers into some perspective Australia is of a compar able size to the lower 48 US states these 48 US states have a population of more than 300 million people while Australia only has a population of little more than 26 million this means that there are two American states that have more people than the entirety of the Australian continent California with more than 39 million and Texas with more than 28 million from our European perspective the population of only England without factoring in any of the rest of the UK is more than double the entire population of Australia despite being an entire continent there are actually seven significantly smaller Islands across the world that have higher populations than Australia Great Britain of course along with honu Luzan mindo Java Sumatra and Madagascar Java alone has nearly six times Australia's tiny population despite being an island that is 6 times smaller than Australia the continent but it still gets even crazier because there's also a bunch of cities across the world that right now have more people than the entire continent as well the Tokyo Jakarta and Delhi metropolitan areas all have greater populations than the entirety of Australia well the Shanghai and sole Metro areas have roughly similar populations sou Paulo Mexico City New York City Cairo Lagos Mumbai and Mos all have largely comparable Metropolitan populations to Australia as well at all things considered Australia really only has five actual major cities across their continent Sydney Melbourne Brisbane Perth and Adelaide which collectively account for the residences of nearly two out of every three Australians Australia is therefore among the most heavily urbanized nations in the world with the overwhelming majority of the population around 90% concentrated into relatively small urban areas that only account for 0.22% of Australia's total land area with half of the overall population living within just these red areas and the other half almost entirely living in these blue areas overall around 85% of all Australians live within just 50 km of the coastline meaning that there's hardly anyone deeper into the continent's vast interior this unique population distribution creates a lot of fascinatingly bizarre situations across the continent for example this is the Shire of East pilara in Western Australia it is roughly the same size as Japan but there's only a bit more than 10,000 people who live here and half of them just live right here in the town of Newman it's basically just a small town but with the space of Japan then perhaps even more strangely there's the Pastoral unincorporated area down here in South Australia this dot is the city of Adelaide Australia's fifth largest city home to more than 1.3 million people and immediately adjacent to this Oasis of urban life is the Pastoral unincorporated area a territory that's roughly the size of France but is only home to a whopping 3,750 people making the population density something like 178 Square km of land for every one person that is roughly one Aruba's worth of land for every single resident inside of the Pastoral unincorporated area then there's also Anna Creek right over here this is a huge territory that's slightly larger than Israel and yet it isn't a country or even a governmental entity at all no Ana Creek is actually just a privately owned cattle ranch the largest cattle ranch found anywhere in the world by far that is only staffed by eight full-time employees according to Wikipedia so this entire area that's the size of Israel is usually only home to less than a dozen people and around 10,000 cows Australia is really really really empty and to hammer the point home even further consider the towns of esperence on the south coast and kuna near to the North Coast both of these towns are within the same state of Western Australia and it takes at least 35 hours of time to drive from one to the other across a distance of more than 3,200 km and along that entire distance in time you'll maybe only drive through a population of less than 70,000 people the entire way for comparison this drive would be about the same time in distance as driving from Madrid to Istanbul across nearly the whole of Europe where there would be a lot more than 70,000 people so what is it about Australia that makes it such an over we all empty void of people what is it about this continent that has made everything I just brought up possible well the easy answer that I'm sure most of you were thinking right now is the desert duh everybody knows that Australia is covered in a big old desert with tons of super dangerous animals and insects who would ever want to actually live in most of the country and while there is some truths to this line of thinking I here to argue with you that that's only a small part of of the overall population puzzle in Australia and the full explanation for why there are so few people on this continent is overall a pretty complicated one most of the problem stems from the fact that Australia is pretty uniquely cursed when it comes to both a geologic and location perspective located relatively close by to Antarctica the Frozen continent the western side of Australia is continuously battered by cold ocean currents coming up from the Southern Ocean which means that there simply isn't enough heat to generate large scale evaporation that's necessary to form rain clouds over much of the West meanwhile in the East the Great Dividing Range is Australia's largest and longest chain of mountains and the fifth longest anywhere in the world these Mountains run down the entire Eastern side of the continent from north to south and their height denies many rainclouds advancing from the Pacific the ability to move any further into Australia than the immediate and narrow band of land between the mountains and the coastline thus a so-called rain shadow is cast by these mountains across the vastness of the Australian interior to the west where moisture coming in from the East understandably struggles to penetrate into but these mountains generally speaking from a Global Perspective aren't really all that impressive truly big mountains cannot be found anywhere where on the surface of Australia and overall the continent has the lowest average elevation of all of Earth's continents which just creates a further huge problem for rainfall the tallest mountain and highest point that can be found anywhere in Mainland Australia is here within the Great Dividing Range Mount Kiosco and it's only 2,228 M high above sea level for comparison the highest point of every single other inhabited continent is at least more than double that height and nearly 34 of the entire US state of Colorado alone maintains an elevation that is significantly higher than just that one sort of tall mountain in Australia this means that there are simply very few tall mountains to be found anywhere on the continent that are actually capable of forcing air upwards where it's possible to cool into rain and then to make matters even worse that air is very often just too hot for rain to form and anyway because the continent straddles the boundary of the Tropic of Capricorn placing a significant amount of Northern Australia to be well within the tropics and almost the rest of the continent down in the subtropic this area of the world is dominated by the subtropical high pressure belt that wraps around the entire globe and it simultaneously serves to both warm and dry the air around it so whatever air even does get pushed up by the few tall mountains in Australia has to also contend with this phenomenon and what's even more Australia has to also contend with the difficult to predict oscillations of the Southern Pacific ocean known as elino and linia during an elino event which can sometimes last for years at a time the Southern Pacific often goes through prolonged periods of slower than usual Westerly winds and that naturally means that there will be less atmospheric moisture delivered by those winds to the eastern and Northern parts of the Australian continent of been accompanied by exacerbated drought-like conditions it's unsurprising then that many of the worst bushfires in Australia's history have taken place at the exact same time as during one of these El Nino events all of these factors converge to make Australia by far the driest inhabited continent on the earth with the least amount of average annual rainfall and consequently desert or desert like conditions understandably exist over about 35 5% of the continent's total area I mean just take a look at this map of Australia's average rates of annual rainfall where you can see most of the rain on the continent falls on the east coast in the stretch of land between the coastline and the Great Dividing Range in the north that stretches into the tropics Tasmania in the South and around Perth in the southwest corner it's basically an identical map with Australia's current population density pattern except in one very interesting and notable area Northern Australia the problem up here is is not that it receives a low amount of rain on average but that it receives that rain largely all at once and over ridiculously variable periods of time just like everywhere else in the tropics Northern Australia is dominated by the wet and the dry season where rainfall is greater during the summer and less during the winter in the case of Darwin the largest city up here on Australia's northern coast the average annual rainfall amount is more than 1,800 mm which is nearly triple the amount of rainfall that London gets however the vast majority of that rain falls during just the 4 months of the wet season between December and March when the area's monsoons and tropical Cyclones are generally active and when you discount the immediate Coastline the rest of Northern Australia in the interior between the coast in the North and the Tropic of Capricorn in the South suffers from some of the most highly erratic rainfalls seen anywhere on the planet largely owing to the unpredictable pattern of the area's tropical Cyclones back in 1898 one of these Cyclones dumped an absolutely unbelievable 740 mm of rain over this small Northern Australian town in just a single day more than the entire average annual rainfall of London which could give the false impression if you just looked at that single year of more rainfall here than in the UK but then a few decades later on in 1924 without any Cyclones penetrating through to the interior here this town only received 4 mm of rain throughout the whole year which is even less than the yearly average of the Sahara desert but it's not just the erratic nature of the continent's rainfall that makes fresh water a scarcity here it's also the lack of any decently large rivers the most significant river system on the continent is the Murray darling Basin here in the Southeast in one of Australia's most heavily populated cores but it just kind of sucks from a build a big civiliz ation perspective first of all the Waters of the system flow southwestward and empty out right here on the south coast this isn't really good because as mentioned previously most of this Basin exists in the part of Australia Beyond The Great Dividing Range that doesn't usually see a lot of rainfall to replenish the rivers with water as a result the average annual flow of the waters in the Basin amounts to just 24,000 gigal lers a year which is the lowest rate of flow of any of the world's greatest river systems for comparison the Mississippi Basin in the United States has an average annual flow of nearly 530,000 gigal a year which is more than 22 times the flow of water that Australia's greatest river system has got nonetheless it's the best that the continent has got and the Basin provides the drinking water for around 3 million Australians today while the area around it has developed into the agricultural Heartland of the modern Australian Nation providing nearly the the entirety of the food that the 26 million people of Australia consume along with enough to export to Millions more across Asia but as climate change continues to worsen the effects of drought on the continent the waters that feed this agricultural Heartland through the Murray darling Basin are getting harder and harder to come by with every passing decade nine of the 10 hottest recorded years in the continent's history have taken place just since 20 5 these higher temperatures are rapidly increasing the rates of evaporation throughout the Waters of the Basin and with already limited rainfall throughout the majority of it it's making the water here increasingly scarce with some sections of the Basin at times remaining completely dry for months on end and it's not just the scarcity of fresh water on the continent that makes sustaining a very large population difficult it's also the scarcity of good land for farming in agriculture owing once again largely to geography geology and location in Northern Australia there hasn't been any new mountain building since the Precambrian era that ended 1 and A2 billion years ago and even further there hasn't been any glacial activity here since the Carboniferous ended nearly 300 million years ago thus this entire region that covers nearly half of the continent has suffered its soils being beneath continuous weather Ing and erosion for well over 250 million years compared to less than 10,000 years for most of the soils on other continents like North America Europe or Asia therefore the soil nearly everywhere in Northern Australia just sucks for agriculture the only exception to that rule is the area of the River Basin that drains here into Lake Erie but this is an overall small amount of the North and the rainfall required for irrigation here is still very low but the thing is none of these Geographic or climatic explanations really give the full picture because despite everything that I just spent the last 10 minutes explaining to you it turns out that Australia actually has a ton of freshwater resources well at least when compar to countries and not to continents in fact Australia has an estimated 492 cubic kilom worth of renewable freshwater resources which is more than a lot of countries with significant L higher populations that's twice as much as Pakistan for example a country which has more than eight times as many people so it's not just a sheer lack of freshwater and it's not just a sheer lack of aable land either while yeah only about 6% of Australia's land is actually airable and suitable for agriculture Australia is huge so that 6% is still a ton of usable Farmland to put it in a context Australia has more aable land than Indonesia Malaysia Singapore the Philippines Vietnam Cambodia and La all have combined despite all of these countries having a combined population of 542 million people and Australia only having 26 million people to put it into another perspective Australia has by far the highest ratio in the entire world of arable land to population at around 1.9 arable hectares of land for every one citizen of the country for the sake of comparison the ratio in the United States is only about 0.47 aable hectares of land per one citizen this means that if Australia ever reached the same ratio of aable land to people as the United States the continent would be home to well over 90 million people still substantially less than the population of America but also substantially more people than Australia has today in theory Australia does have enough space and resources to support a lot more people than the 26 million who live there today the big reason why it doesn't is because for pretty much the entire history of Australia right up until the present day it's just been a really tough place for anyone to actually get to you see for millions of years now Australia has been effectively a lost continent isolated from all the Earth's other major land masses drifting alone out in the sea this has resulted in millions of years of completely separate Evolution for the animals of the continent which is why Australia is unique among Earth's continents for the fact that marsupial and not placental mammals dominate the indigenous mammal Wildlife species modern humans first reached the continent sometime around 50,000 years ago when the area's geography looked radically different than it does today with sea levels significantly lower back then humans were able to simply walk down the Sunda Peninsula pop across just a few islands and then make it into present day New Guinea which back then was connected to Australia via a land bridge as the prehistoric continent of sahul and after these initial humans made it to the continent they remained almost entirely undisturbed for tens of thousands of years by any other groups of humans from anywhere in the outside world as sea levels began to rise following the end of the last ice age sahul was flooded and the land bridge between ugin and Australia fell beneath the waves around 10,000 years ago making Australia even more remote than it had been previously and even less likely to ever be visited by Outsiders for the next 9600 years before the eventual arrival of the Europeans in the 17th century the Australian continent may have only been significantly visited and impacted by outside humans a total of just two times dingo an invasive species of dog likely originating from New Guinea were introduced to Australia sometime around 8,300 years years ago potentially by an unknown group of human visitors coming from the island about 11% of the modern Aboriginal Australian DNA also derives from Indians which suggests a potential encounter on the continent with a group of humans from South Asia sometime around 4,000 years ago and then after a millennia of existing almost entirely undisturbed by the outside world in 1606 a Dutchman and his crew suddenly showed up on their ships and landed right here on the western side of the cape York Peninsula but even after that the Dutch never really bother to ever establish any permanent settlements or presence on the continent because the parts of it that they found were generally decided to be too uninhabitable for all the reasons that I mentioned during the first half of this video the closest the Dutch ever came to a permanent settlement on Australia happened entirely by accident 50 years after their Discovery in 1656 a Dutch ship called the verula drive crashed off the coast of Western Australia around here 75 of the ship survivors miraculously made it to the shore and then seven of them were dispatched on one of the ship's lifeboats to make the 1,400m long journey over to bavia or modern day Jakarta on the island of java which was the administrative capital of colonial Dutch rule in Indonesia at the time after 41 grueling days of travel these seven people finally made it to bavia and raised the alarm arm for the 68 crew and passengers who they had left behind back in Australia and for the next several years numerous search and rescue missions were carried out by the Dutch Navy all along the western Australian coast but little sign of the ship's wreckage was ever discovered and the 68 survivors of the verula drak who were left behind were simply never seen or heard from again their ultimate Fates remaining a mystery to this day they simply vanished into the vast void of Australia and history without much of a trace more than three centuries of time would pass before finally in 1963 the wreckage of the verula drak was discovered by a team of Australian divers roughly 100 km north of modern-day Perth well over a century after the vanishing of the verula 68 on the continent the British finally established the first truly permanent European settlement Australia only in 1788 over on the complete other side of the continent around modern-day Sydney with around 1,300 people at the time the ainal population of the continent was likely only somewhere around 650,000 which was pretty much the entire population of Australia as a whole to put that into perspective every other inhabited continent on the planet had vastly vastly more people than that that back in 1788 Asia already had more than 650 million people around a thousand times the population of Australia while Europe had nearly 150 million Africa had 85 million and the Americas had around 20 million Australia there began the modern era of industrialization from a far far lower population base than any other of Earth's inhabited continents and since population growth tends to be exponential Australia has been lagging behind the rest for centuries in 1788 the population of the freshly independent United States stood at around 4 million people it would take Australia More Than A Century Of History not until the year 1906 to finally surpassed the population of the United States back in 1788 and by 1906 America's population was already pushing 90 million for most of Australia's history immigration came almost entirely from just a single Source the British Isles following the discovery of gold on the continent in 1851 a massive Gold Rush to Australia ensued that saw around 2% of the entire population of the British Isles immigrate to Australia throughout the decade of the 1850s and more than doubled the Australian population almost overnight but Australia struggled to attract large numbers of immigrants from Europe afterwards because it was heavily competing for them with more attractive countries in the Americas like the United States Canada Brazil and Argentina who were much closer to Europe geographically and were thus generally cheaper and quicker for Europeans to immigrate to it didn't help that beginning in 1901 the Australian government enacted a policy that would artificially reduce their numbers of immigrants to the continent for decades the racist white Australia policy which restricted immigration to only people of white European ancestry and initially gave overwhelming preference to migrants coming specifically from Britain as a result the flow of immigrants to the continent remained only a trickle of people for decades across the early 20th century while at the same time millions of immigrants were arriving in the United States every couple of years the population of Australia even shrank during World War I when nearly one in five of Australia's men were shipped off to fight the war in Europe around 2 and a half per of Australia's entire male population of the time never made it back home from the trenches and beaches of Europe by the eve of World War II Australia was a small and overwhelmingly European nation of only around 7 million on the periphery of Asia and many white Australians of the time were terrified of being demographically overwhelmed by the extremely more populous nations of Asia just to the North By the time war came to the continent Imperial Japan had more than 10 times Australia's population at more than 73 million and after the Japanese bombed the northern Australian city of Darwin in 1942 fears across the continent were Rife that an imminent Japanese invasion was coming and while The Invasion never actually materialized the Australian government nonetheless came to believe that they needed to increase their population to avoid the threat of another Invasion scare like that again in the future before 1945 almost all the immigrants to Australia came from either Great Britain or Ireland but after the war Australia for the very first time began encouraging immigration from across the European continent the policies restricting immigration largely only to Britains were gradually relaxed to be more inclusive of all Europeans and by the 1960s 3 million Mainland Europeans from places like the Baltic states Poland Italy the Balkans and Greece packed up their bags and headed to Australia to begin a brand new life many of them being displaced refugees from the war but the exclusion of non-whites as immigrants to the continent remained largely in force for several more decades even after the war it wasn't until 1973 nearly three decades after the end of World War II that the white Australia policy was finally overturned and race ceased being a factor in the continent's immigration policy ever since Australia has maintained an official policy of multiculturalism and has welcomed large scale multiethnic immigration for decades from all across the world and now in the 21st century the vast majority of new immigrants to the continent come from Asia and not from Europe especially from China and India Today Australia caps the new numbers of immigrants to the continent at less than 200,000 a year which for a country of only 26 million is actually a pretty consistently High rate of immigration as of 2022 nearly one in three people on the Australian continent was born outside of it which is by far the highest proportion of immigrants found in the population of any developed Western Nation Australia Today is a proud nation of immigrants from all across the world and by 2050 the continent's population is projected to increase up to around 36 million about the same as Canada today and largely through continued immigration but the growth over the next two decades will not come without its challenges the continent's ancient natural challenges like unpredictable rainfall drying Rivers droughts and vast Aid Wilderness along with new challenges like the uncertain course of climate change mean that Australia has an epic battle against its own environment ahead of it to continue increasing their population but despite all the odds that are stacked up against them the country is actually one of the world's most major agricultural producers and exporters with more than 104 million sheep on the continent there are four times as many sheep as humans and consequently Australia is the world's second largest producer of Sheep and Wool and the fifth largest producer of beef in addition Australia is the home of slightly more than half of all the world's certified organic farmland and as a global leader in almond and lals production and best of all Australia's Rich culinary culture is heavily represented by the sponsor of this video hellofresh through delicious recipes like their sweet and savory pancakes crumbed pumpkin wedges or lamington style chocolate brownies and if you're anything like me you typically struggle a lot to decide what to do at dinner time should I order expensive takeout eat unhealthy freezer food 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