Australia's biggest cities! Introduction

Australia’s big cities!

Geography is one of my chief interests. The shape of the land, why it curves the way it does, and how people bend and break in order to conform to it (or not!) are fascinating to contemplate.

Australia’s geography, both natural and human, is one of the most fascinating on Earth. Australia is the smallest continent by almost every reckoning of continents (Western countries are taught there are seven, but I prefer to say there are six...Europe is just too connected to the rest of Asia to simply split off. Other groupings will say there are five, or even just four, but I don’t think it’s logically consistent to lump Africa together with the Eurasian continent or South with North America, so six it is. In my brain, anyway. So there.)

Australia’s surface is the oldest of any continent on Earth. The other continents are about the same age in their root rocks, but their surfaces, on the other hand, have been rejuvenated by seismic and volcanic activity over the course of the eras. Australia’s, on the other hand, have not. Aside from the events that uplifted the Great Dividing Range in the east and the Kimberley region in the north west, between 2-6 million years ago, there have been no major changes on the surface of the majority of Australia for hundreds of millions of years. Aside from a small chain of volcanic centers in the southeast of the continent, no volcanic activity has been recorded for the majority of the continent, as well very little seismic activity.

What are the implications? The first: impoverished soils. Without volcanoes erupting or mountains uplifting and then eroding, the soils are very old and leached of most nutrients. Second: salt. Salt everywhere. Salt. Huge parts of Australia have been repeatedly covered by shallow seas that then evaporated, leaving behind large amounts of salt that inhibit plant growth. Third: desertification. As Australia drifted northward from the Antarctic Circle towards the tropics, temperatures rose and precipitation dropped, drying out the continent until it looked much as it does in its present state, changes from lush green forests to vast, red deserts. Fourth: flatness. Due to its age, the surface of Australia has been weathered down to extremely flat. In the Channel Country deserts, the gradient is 1 in 6000. The rivers flow there flow down a gradient of a mere 17 centimeters per kilometer.

Due to its isolation, poor soils, and changes in climate and age, Australia is simply weird. It’s just WEIRD. Climactically, biologically, ecologically, it is a strange place. The combination of leached soils and aridity renders its carrying capacity very low...even in the modern era with all our gadgets and trinkets and irrigation and such, the population of Australia is only 24 million. That’s 15 million less people than California on almost 20 times the amount of land. Australia’s general poorness is also what made its aboriginal populations quite low. Yet it possesses a fascinating diversity of life

Its human geography is also fascinating. Almost 90% of its people live in handful of large urban areas smattered widely across the continent, concentrated in the richer parts of the land (two thumbs up if you get that reference.)

I would love to ask “Why?” But given that I’m not a sociologist and only understand so much, the scope of this project is not to answer why everybody in Australia hangs out in Sydney, it is just to learn the highlights of the various major cities of Australia and have an excuse to post awesome skyscraper skylines on my Facebook page.

Enjoy!