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The Australian Outback
Seventy percent of a continent, and almost nobody in it
Distance is the defining hazard. The Outback is the arid and semi-arid interior of Australia — some 5.6 million square kilometers, about 70 percent of the continent — inhabited by fewer than a million people, an emptiness on a scale nothing in Europe or North America can match. Children have taken their lessons by radio and now by satellite; the Royal Flying Doctor Service exists because the nearest hospital may be a day away. The region has no legal boundary whatsoever. Australians describe it by feel, as everything beyond the coastal cities and the farming belt, and the vagueness is honest, because what unifies the Outback is not a line but a condition: too little rain, too far from anywhere.
The continent is old and worn nearly flat, its mountains ground down over hundreds of millions of years, and the Outback shows it: gibber plains of wind-polished stone, red dunefields in the Simpson and Great Victoria deserts, and salt pans such as Lake Eyre, which lies below sea level and fills perhaps a few times a century, when it briefly becomes the largest lake in the country and pelicans arrive from nowhere. The MacDonnell Ranges in the Northern Territory hold Mount Zeil at 1,531 meters, the highest point west of the Great Dividing Range. The sandstone monolith of Uluru rises from the plain in the Red Centre. Beneath it all lies the Great Artesian Basin, the water that makes cattle stations possible.
Aboriginal Australians have lived across this country for more than 50,000 years, reading it through songlines and managing it with fire, and many of the most remote communities are theirs; native title now covers a substantial share of the land. The settler economy is mining and pastoralism — iron ore in the Pilbara, gold at Kalgoorlie, cattle stations larger than small nations — and it has always depended on people willing to live far from anyone else. Uluru, once swarmed by tourists on its flanks, has been closed to climbers since 2019 at the request of its traditional owners, the Anangu: a small shift that says a good deal about how the country's relationship with its own interior is changing.