- 2 weeks ago
This Outer Side video explores a geographical question many people notice on a map but rarely stop to ask: if Northern Australia gets nearly three times the rainfall of London and faces some of the richest shipping lanes in the world, why does almost nobody live there?
At the center of this story is the Top End — a vast, wet, and wildly remote stretch of land spanning the Northern Territory and the Kimberley. Looking at a map, it seems like it should be thriving. Yet the entire Northern Territory holds fewer people than Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, packed into an area larger than France, Germany, and the UK combined.
The answer starts not with the weather, or even the cyclones — but with something far older. Something 300 million years in the making.
At the center of this story is the Top End — a vast, wet, and wildly remote stretch of land spanning the Northern Territory and the Kimberley. Looking at a map, it seems like it should be thriving. Yet the entire Northern Territory holds fewer people than Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, packed into an area larger than France, Germany, and the UK combined.
The answer starts not with the weather, or even the cyclones — but with something far older. Something 300 million years in the making.
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00:00If you look at a map of northern Australia, there's something that doesn't quite add up.
00:05Nobody lives there, and yet it faces one of the richest shipping lanes in the world.
00:10And it's not because it's too hot and too dry, because the northern coast gets nearly
00:14three times as much rainfall as in London, and we know how wet London is.
00:19But even so, there are fewer people living in the Northern Territory than live in Pittsburgh,
00:23Pennsylvania. That's a 1.35 million square kilometer area with a population you could
00:29get inside a reasonable football stadium. So it's not the heat, and it's not even the cyclones.
00:35Well, not entirely, but I'll get to that. And it's not the distance it is from other places.
00:40Let's start by looking at the rainfall. If you pull up a population density map of Australia,
00:45and then you get a rainfall map of Australia, you could see the pattern immediately.
00:50In most of the places in Australia where rain falls, like the east coast with Sydney and Melbourne,
00:54the southwest coast around Perth, in Tasmania even, you find a lot of people. It's quite
01:00clear that rain and people go together. That is, except in the north. There's plenty of rainfall
01:06up in the north. Darwin receives 1,800 millimeters of rain every year, and the Kimberley region up north
01:11gets as much as 1,500 millimeters depending on whereabouts you are. In fact, sometimes it gets too
01:17much rain. Cyclones hit the north of Australia quite often. Darwin has been pretty much destroyed by
01:23cyclones three times. Once back in 1897, then again in 1937, and then most recently in 1974.
01:31There's no other major developed city on earth that's been flattened that many times, and the floods keep
01:36coming and bigger year on year because of climate change. But that doesn't explain why it's empty,
01:42because there are other parts of that region that are also hit by the same cyclones and have massive
01:47populations. Jakarta, for example, receives between 1,800 and 2,150 millimeters of rain a year,
01:54is also hit by cyclones, but has a metropolitan area of nearly 30 million people. That's how it
01:59usually works. A lot of water means great agriculture, which means a big town, which in turn means a
02:05thriving regional economy. But only about 147,000 live in Darwin, and the pretty wet northern territory,
02:12which is big enough to fit in France, Germany, United Kingdom, and just about Portugal inside it,
02:18there are only 263,000 people. So something else must be going on. Well, there are two main factors.
02:26The first is the land itself, and the second is the people who actually live on it. So let's start
02:31with the land. One of the things that happens quite regularly on earth are ice ages. And when you get
02:37an
02:37ice age, you get glaciers covering the surface of the earth. When glaciers roll over the earth,
02:42they scrape away any ancient weathered soil from the top surface. And when they retreat,
02:47you have a nice, healthy, fresh layer of soil ready for plants to grow in. That's why you get
02:52such rich farmlands in places like the American Midwest and Northern Europe and Eastern China.
02:57Their actual soil is pretty young, barely 10,000 years old, and it's packed with phosphorus and
03:03nitrogen and organic materials and all the other good stuff that crops need to grow. But the bedrock
03:08in Northern Australia is something known as the Australian Shield. It's a stable, heavily eroded
03:14block that hasn't been covered by glaciers in over 300 million years. 300 million years is a very big
03:21number and hard to imagine. So imagine this. If the topsoil in the Midwestern United States, which has
03:27been hanging around for 10,000 years, which is a pretty long time, about as long as humans have been
03:32farming, were packed into just a single day, then the Northern Australian soil would have
03:36been hanging around unprotected for 70 years. And that 70 years, or rather 300 million year old soil,
03:44has become something called laterite. With laterite, the nutrients have been stripped out.
03:49What you've got is an iron-rich crust that resists plant roots and locks out the elements that crops
03:55really need, like sulfur and, most importantly, phosphorus. Plants need phosphorus for cell growth,
04:01and whereas a lot of nutrients you can just put back into the soil using fertilizer and other
04:06things, you can't do that with laterite. Any phosphorus you spray on the land chemically binds
04:11to the iron and aluminum oxides in the soil, and that locks the phosphorus away before the plants can
04:17get to it. Put simply, it's a soil that's been chemically exhausted by a quarter of a billion years
04:22of rain and no protection to keep it healthy. And that's a massive problem, and it basically means
04:27that if you try to plant crops there, they're not going to do very well. But despite Australia having
04:32what could only be described as dead soil, for longer than most continents have existed in their
04:37current form, that hasn't stopped the government from trying to farm there anyway. Back in the 1950s,
04:42the government of Australia looked at the Ord River in the East Kimberley region of Western Australia,
04:47and thought, surely we could use that to get some farms going further up north. It made sense.
04:52The river, being a river, carried tons of water. The land there was flat, and the climate was warm.
04:58All the north needed, the thinking went, was some irrigation from that river. Add some water to the
05:03equation, and the soil would have to do as it's told all year round. And so, flush with the post
05:09-war
05:09dream that engineering could overcome anything, they decided to make a huge bet on the agricultural
05:14future of northern Australia and build a massive dam, the boringly titled Ord River Diversion Dam.
05:21At the dam's official opening ceremony, almost as if the universe was trying to tell them something,
05:26a symbolic explosion of explosives failed to explode. That didn't stop them building the dam,
05:32and once it was done, they created a new lake. Lake Kununura. So, with their new irrigated land,
05:39they started planting. The first thing that caused problems was the wildlife. They began by planting
05:44cotton. Pretty quickly, pink ball worm appeared and destroyed it. The farmers fired back,
05:50spraying chemicals to fight the pest, but those chemicals wiped out the ballworm's natural
05:54predators and just made things worse. So, they decided, forget the cotton, let's try sorghum.
06:00Well, mildew came along and took that. Then, they decided they were going to try rice.
06:05The birds ate the rice, and what they didn't eat, seasonal floods completely destroyed.
06:10In turn, they then tried peanuts, and safflower, and linseed. And every time,
06:15because there wasn't enough nutrients in the soil, nothing grew properly. It was a really
06:20expensive mistake. How expensive? Well, the Australia Institute calculated that the public
06:25investment in that scheme was around 2 billion Australian dollars. That's just under 1.4 billion
06:31US. That doesn't mean they stopped trying to expand. In fact, for the most recent expansion,
06:36they spent 364 million Australian dollars and created approximately, wait for it, 60. Yes,
06:446-0 jobs. That's one job per 6 million dollars. You could go to Sydney and buy each of those
06:51workers
06:52a house and still have hundreds of millions left over. Total employment today in irrigated agriculture
06:57in the Ord is about 260 people. But it's not just the government who are wasting money. Fairly recently,
07:04a Chinese developer called Kimberley Agricultural Investments was given 8,000 hectares of irrigated
07:10land to farm. And they managed to farm on just 1,600 hectares. So even modern technology, foreign capital,
07:17decades of accumulated knowledge, hasn't got the scheme to work. The mistake is that water isn't the
07:23problem. It doesn't matter how much water you pour onto laterite, it won't feed a city. But then,
07:29people started to think, if you can't grow things on it, maybe you can raise something on it.
07:34In 1879, Alexander Forrest released a grazing report. In that report, he suggested raising cattle
07:41in the Kimberley region and across Australia. Cattle stations spread across the country,
07:46some of them covering the areas of small European countries. For example, one station, Alexandria
07:51Station, covers about 1.6 million hectares or 4 million acres. That's roughly 10 times the size of
07:58Greater London. The reason for that, of course, is that the soil's no good. Not only is it no good
08:04for crops, it's no good for the kind of things that cows like to eat. Whereas in Europe, where you've
08:09got lush grassland, you can get a couple of cows living off one hectare of land. In Australia, you need
08:1515 to 20 hectares per animal. And in some of the really drier areas, that stretches to more than 50
08:21hectares per animal. There's just not enough there to keep everything fed. So you end up with cattle
08:27stations the size of Belgium, with just a few thousand cattle and only a handful of workers.
08:32And they had another issue, because every season when the monsoon arrived, it would destroy their
08:37roads. A single monsoon event could damage around 29,000 kilometers of farm roads and destroy nearly
08:44as much fencing. That's enough damaged roads to stretch from Sydney to London and back. It also
08:50wasn't really good for the livestock. In one wet season, you could lose between 300,000 and 660,000
08:57animals because of the rain. That's more cattle lost in a single season than the entire national
09:02herd of New Zealand. It's been calculated that for every $1,000 invested in a northern cattle station,
09:09you could earn about $2 a year. You'd be better off with a savings account. But even with those issues,
09:15the cattle industry managed to sustain itself for nearly a century because there was a little bit
09:20of a dark secret. The landowners were getting aboriginal workers to work on the land, but paying
09:26them little to nothing. They used some old quasi-legal arrangements that said the colonists had the
09:31right to use both the land and the labor that was native to it. And that gave them dirt-cheap
09:37workers
09:37that kept the whole thing functioning. But in 1966, there was something called the Equal Wage Decision,
09:43and that changed everything. All of a sudden, the cattle station owners had to pay the First
09:48Nation workers a fair wage, and that meant the whole economic model collapsed. Today,
09:54there are open debates as to whether the beef industry in northern Australia is economically
09:58viable at all. And it all comes back to the same problem, the old leech-depleted soil that can't
10:04sustain human activity or even cow activity in big numbers. What happened next was that those stations
10:10got rid of the local workers, and some of the aboriginal communities were displaced from land
10:15that they lived and worked on for thousands of generations. And that brings us to the other element
10:20that has a lot to do with why the north is so empty, the people who actually live there. Not
10:26long
10:26after the cattle economy fell apart, aboriginal communities began the long fight to reclaim their
10:31country. The native populations of northern Australia have been living there for as much as 60,000
10:37years, but they knew how to make it work. They use something called fire stick farming, which is when
10:42you burn a small section of grassland and leaves on purpose when the weather's cool enough to stop
10:47the flames from getting out of hand and burning down the trees. Cool burning, as they call it.
10:52By clearing the ground that way, it kept the old dry plants down, and it gave you a patchwork of
10:57green
10:57areas where useful plants would grow. Those useful plants would then attract animals they could hunt.
11:02They did this not only to help feed themselves, but as part of their caring for country philosophy.
11:07It's the crazy idea that if you look after the land, the land will look after you. And a big
11:13part of
11:13that is making sure the population stays low enough for the land to sustain it, not shoehorning millions
11:18of people into an area where they probably shouldn't be. Massive cattle farms that eventually drive them
11:24off their own land and catastrophic dams don't really fit with that ethos. So after being kicked off the
11:30cattle stations, they decided enough was enough. The 1966 Wave Hill walk-off became one of the
11:37defining moments in Australian civil rights. Then the Yall Knew Bark petition followed, and a decade
11:42of political pressure began to build. In 1976, the Aboriginal Land Rights Act was passed into law,
11:49and that shapes the entire map. Today, 70 percent of the Northern Territory is under control of
11:55Aboriginal Australians, and in the Kimberley region, that's 91 percent. In another part of
12:00Northern Australia, Cape York, the traditional owners control 98 percent of the peninsula, and
12:06across the whole of Northern Australia, they hold the rights and interests to about 94 percent of the land.
12:12What that means in practical terms is that the sort of private freehold development model,
12:16the kind of model that built the big cities like Sydney and Melbourne and Brisbane, can't happen in
12:21most of the north of Australia. And this isn't a temporary situation. It's a reality, both geographic
12:27and legal, that shapes the population map just as powerfully as the soil chemistry does. That, of course,
12:34doesn't stop the government from the south trying to stuff more people in the north. Back in 2015,
12:39they published a white paper, and it promised to control the north's population, um, somehow.
12:44It was the most ambitious development commitment in the region's modern history. A decade later,
12:50the Australian Strategic Policy Institute said the plan provided, and I quote,
12:55no clear direction as to how this would be achieved. Like I said, somehow. Since 2013,
13:01the northern population has, at best, stayed pretty much the same, and in some areas, it got smaller.
13:07In 2025, it was projected that Darwin would grow just 1.2 percent per year through to 2035,
13:13and the rest of the north was even less, less than 0.04 of a percent. So that's just 29
13:20,000 new people
13:21added to the whole of the north, or about as many new people as Sydney gets every six months, but
13:27over
13:2710 years. That's quite a lot less than quadruple. And there's another problem that involves people.
13:33A lot of the people that do live there don't actually live there exactly. What they do is they
13:39work up north on rotating shifts, get their money, and then go back to live in the southern cities.
13:44Now, the Northern Territory government has said that they can't keep going on what they call a
13:49fly-in, fly-out workforce, and that it's bad for the local communities and hollows out the economic base,
13:54and that permanent towns need more people to stay around to survive. And they're right,
13:58but people aren't staying around. And all the government can do to try and stop it is keep spending.
14:05For example, seven billion dollars on the Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility.
14:09It's the largest public lending commitment to regional development in Australian history,
14:14and also a confession that they need more than private markets to develop the north.
14:18But it's still empty, and the geographic forces are still winning.
14:23It's something that the Australian aboriginals have known for eons.
14:26And these people have been living in the region for 65,000 years, and they know that the population
14:31can't get too big. You can live there, you just can't have too many people living there.
14:36And maybe that's the lesson we should learn. Not every place on earth is waiting to be developed,
14:42settled, and turned into a city by a white dude. Some places have their own rules, written by people
14:48who have lived there for thousands of generations, and by the soil itself over 300 million years.
14:54Governments came, engineers came, even farmers came, and the land and the people just fought back.
15:00300 million years of nature and 60,000 years of patience tends to win.
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