Big or Little?

A few more thoughts on Australia before I tell you all about getting back to the USA.

Is Australia a big country or a little country? How would you vote?

Australia is a big country! It's the 6th largest country by land mass in the world (7,686,850 square kilometers). If you took out Alaska and Hawaii, it's pretty much the same size as the continental US. In fact, it's its own continent! That's BIG.

Australia is a small country. It has 30 million people. In fact, its population density is 3 people per square kilometer (the US has 317 per sq km; Canada has 3.5 but they have even more land mass!). They are 51st in the world for population but 235th (out of 241 countries) in the world for population density. (The US has 317 per sq. km) There is a lot of open space in Australia. They have 10% of the population the US does in roughly the same land mass.

They've got fewer people than the US, Canada, and the UK (countries they often compare themselves to) but more than New Zealand (and, trust me, that matters!).

This is a conflict the Australians live with every day. That big honkin' piece o' real estate gives them a sense of massiveness, of size, of bulk. And they start to expect certain things of themselves because of the size of the land. (I wonder if Canadians have the same challenge?)

Every so often, I would overhear a conversation about how the Australian people needed to start filling out this enormous land mass (ignoring the fact that most of those wide-open spaces are desert). The thought seemed to be that it was incongruous to have so few people in so large a space. I would overhear conversations expressing frustration that this or that thing wasn't happening despite Australia being a "big" country.

On the other hand, Australians also feel their smallness too, especially when it comes to their role on the world stage. I ended up feeling that Australians are not confident that their population could defend their landmass if they had to; there just aren't enough of them. Though they have the consumer expectations of larger populations, they don't have the economy to support it because they don't have the manufacturing. So, they pay for a lot of imports. They argue about whether they truly need a national broadband program because they are so large/small.

Part of the confusion, of course, is that the word "Australia" literally refers to something large and something (relatively) small -- a landmass and a people. We are the United States but we aren't North America. Neither is Canada. The UK isn't even all of the British Isles. It's something no other country in the world has to contend with.

I can understand the confusion.