European reacts to Why Almost NOBODY Lives On Australia's West Coast | Reaction by @sergiomendes on 3Speak
Sharing my thoughts on this educational geography breakdown exploring why almost nobody lives along the massive expanse of Australia's western coastline. Outside of Perth and a few small mining and...
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Today I want to react to why almost nobody lives on Australia's West Coast and learn a little bit about it, because we have all heard the stories about the wild animals, and I want to see if that is one of the factors, and also maybe learn. because there might be other reasons that I don't know about. Now, if you guys want more reactions like this, and if you guys are having fun with this one, please don't forget, drop a like, subscribe to the channel, turn notifications on, and share this video in your socials with your friends. Also, if you want to support me on the channel directly, there's a link for my Buy Me a Coffee, you can do it that way. I would be super thankful. This video, it is... on Geography by Jeff Channel. So if you guys want to go and show some love, you should do it because without him, we wouldn't be able to learn these. Now, let's check it out. Western Australia is the second largest administrative division on Earth, roughly the size of Western Europe, and it covers an enormous chunk of the Australian continent. But despite taking up roughly a third of Australia and having a huge coastline, it is exceptionally empty. Listen, it's not a new information that Australia is huge for me. But I don't know why I grew up thinking Australia was just like a smaller island, and it obviously seems like I keep forgetting how big it is. Because this one-thirds of Australia, it's the same size as Western... Europe, wow, that's large. While Australia's East Coast has a number of major cities, the West Coast only has Perth, leaving the rest of Western Australia pretty much a ghost town. So why don't more Australians live in Western Australia if it's basically closer to everything? I'm Jeff, and this is the weird geographic story of Western Australia. Thank you, Jeff. Let's go. Oops, all out back. The first reason why Western Australia is so desolate is pretty simple. Most of the state is what can charitably be described as an utter wasteland. The central regions are covered by a mix of searing deserts. arid steps, and hummuck grasslands, where only the hardiest of plants and animals can survive. This is a world of rolling sand dunes and endless stretches of dry scrubland, punctuated by dramatic rock formations carved by billions of years of slow weathering. In the interior, you have the Gibson Desert, no relation. The Great Sandy Desert, and the Great Victoria Desert, where water is extremely scarce and- What do you mean? Like desert deserts, like sand's deserts? I had no idea there were deserts in Australia. Fact number two already, and we're just a few minutes in. Wow. That's interesting. Cairs, and temperatures get obscenely, hot, regularly surpassing 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Further west, the vast dunes give way to the rough semi-desert of the Pilbara shrublands. While to the south, there's the Nolabar Plain, a flat, virtually waterless stretch of empty scrubland atop a colossal limestone shelf. Only on the northern and southern tips of the state does the climate even out a little. To the north, there's the Kimberley, a region of tropical savannas, monsoon forests, and barren ridges, stripped of soil by millennia of severe weather. But even here... Okay, so see... I knew there were like a lot of places in Australia that no one were living, but I thought all of them would be like, apparently it is in Kimberley. I guess that's a minority of places that look like that. I thought it was all like forests and jungles. I guess not. I guess I was as so wrong. Okay, okay. We got a lesson here today together, guys. Even here, it's dry for most of the year. The Kimberley has a tropical monsoon climate, which means it only really gets rain during brief but extremely intense wet seasons. As far as human settlement goes, it also doesn't help that the Kimberley is exceptionally rugged. Eons of monsoons have viciously eroded this part of the continent, turning it into a maze of steep ridges. It's a beautiful place, to be sure, but... It's not a good spot for a city. Only Western Australia's Southeastern Corner is a decent place to live. And even then, it's got its challenges. And also, if you want to see what that place looks like on the ground... I've got a whole video about it over on my travel channel. Okay. Just check the link in the description below. Do we need to check that line, guys? Ended in by low hills and plains of infertile, sandy soil, this part of Western Australia is mostly savannah, grasslands, and low woodlands, with a warm but tolerable Mediterranean climate. Between the vibrant Warren and Jara forests in the south, The wide grasslands of the Avon wheat belt in the interior, and the fertile swan coastal plain along the west coast, this part of Australia is packed full of unique plants and animals found nowhere else on Earth. It also supports the region's sole major city, as well as a huge amount of farmland, including fields that grow a staggering 40% of Australia's wheat. But what makes Western Australia such an otherwise barren place? Lot, let us know. other than everything that you already said. A lot of it comes down to rainfall. Across most of Western Australia, rainfall is scarce and unreliable. All the way at the other end of the continent, the great dividing range in Eastern Australia creates a huge rain shadow that stretches across most of the outback, blocking moisture from the Pacific from moving west. Okay. Then, as a one-two punch-out, cold, dry winds moving up the west coast from Antarctica. parch the air, the warm lewine current, which flows down from the tropical Indian ocean, offsets that effect. Yes, we're having a lesson in here on the weather. Lovely. I don't really understand it, but I'm still listening and trying to learn, like, the hot air and the cold hair and elevations and all of it. It's hard, guys. People go to school to learn that. I didn't. That's that effect a little bit, but only in the far southwest part of the state. Australia as a whole is also very flat, with few mountain ranges to force airborne moisture to pool. And as if Australia needed anything else to make it drier, it also has the Tropic of Capricorn, and its associated subtropical pressure belt, cutting right through its heart, bringing warm dry conditions with it. All of these factors come together to create a region with some of the most variable annual rainfall on Earth. The soil across the... a lot of Western Australia is also heavily eroded and extremely depleted, partly because it's some of the oldest soil on Earth. In fact, it sits atop the Australian Shield, an unfathomably ancient slab of continental crust that's been around... What is the Australian Shield? I'm guessing, like, this is something that Australians study in school. I've never heard of the Australian Shield before. I'm losing my voice as well, I don't know why, guys, I'm so sorry. ...around longer than almost any other landmass on Earth. Parts of it date back to the Archeon Eon. with exposed rock that's 3.8 billion years old, making it some of the Earth's first ever continental crust. That's a lot of years. The oldest of the entire world are in Western Australia's Jack Hills, where Zircons have been discovered that date back to 4.4 billion years ago, making them almost as old as the Earth itself. This ancient rock has also been exposed to the elements for an extremely long time. The Yilgarn Creton? which makes up most of Western Australia, has been dry land for a staggering 2.5 billion years. That means erosion has had literally eons to chip away at Western Australia, which is why this region is so flat. But even in a land with so many factors working against it, life still finds a way. What modern humans consider a wasteland is a... Like, nature adapts and... one of the species that it's not very good adapting, and we think we are great, but really, physiologically, we're really not very good adapting. We think we are, but then we look at, like, all the other species, and if we compare, we literally have no adapting skills, other than... We think we build a house and we build this and we're like, create tools to keep us warm and keep us cold and everything. But in the end, genetically, our adaptations... are very slight compared with so many other species. A wasteland is a habitat that countless unique species have adapted too, in spite of the challenges. If you know where to look, even the deserts are full of life, from bilbies and dingoes to skinks and thorny devils. Humans have found a way to make a living in Western Australia too. In fact, this barren corner of the world is home to some of Earth's oldest cultures outside of Africa, proving that human life here isn't impossible. Shaping the lands. Australia's first Aboriginal peoples arrived sometime between 50 ,000 to 70,000 years ago. At a time when sea levels were much lower. Back then, a land bridge united Australia and Papua New Guinea as the ancient landmass of Sahul, while much of the Indonesian archipelago formed the landmass of Sunda. Ancient humans traveling across Southeast Asia were able to cross the narrow gap between Sunda and Sahul by boat, and they ended up in what's now Australia. The first Aboriginal Australians may have come ashore in what's now the Kimberley, and they eventually spread all across the continent, diverging into hundreds of different... So, they would have come from Indonesia, the first people on the land. Okay, okay. Hundreds of different nations and cultures. All across Western Australia, the aboriginals thrived for tens of thousands of years. Not just in that fertile little southwestern corner, but... all along the West Coast. And not only did these people thrive, but they brought new life to the land. In fact, the Aboriginal peoples in Western Australia practically rebuilt the place from the ground up. Key to their way of life was what's called firestick farming, which, through controlled, man-made bushfires, slowly transformed the biogeography of Western Australia. The fires returned key nutrients to Western Australia's parched soil, encouraged greater plant diversity, and turned dry forest into savannah, which led to the spread of larger grass-eating animals, which they have... It's super interesting that, like, the first, like, Aboriginal people on Australia came in through the sides of the islands that it's, like, the most hard to make a living, and they still, like, tried to make it thrive. You know what I mean? Like there were no airplanes or stuff like that. It was way more hard to travel, no cars, no nothing like that, okay, guys, remember? And they were still like, nope, we got here, this is super, super not human friendly, but we gotta do our best to still survive it here and drive. Aboriginal peoples hunted. Even as they shaped their lifestyles around what their lands could support, the aboriginal Australians slowly adapted the lands to better suit those ways of life. And in the process, they laid foundations that still define Western Australia today. Many of Western Australia's European settlements were built on traditional Aboriginal meeting grounds, where firestick farming had improved the land the most, and most of the state's major roads roughly follow old Aboriginal hunting trails and trade routes. Like, This is insane. Western Australia's First Peoples had such a profound effect on the land that it dictated how the original colonies in Western Australia developed. Speaking of Western Australian colonial society, its history only really got started in the early 19th century. Europeans first laid eyes on Australia's West Coast as early as 1616, and virtually the whole coast was mapped in the 1700s. But for all that time... Europeans didn't dare to try to start a settlement there. Most of the early European surveys described the land as bleak and unappealing, and it wasn't until 1829 that Western Australia saw its first permanent European settlement. The first colonists in Western Australia were British, and they founded the Swan River Colony in Australia's fertile southwestern corner. This original settlement developed into the city we now know as Perth, which was built on the traditional lands of the Nungar people. See? I never knew the first British colony and the Australia we know these days because of colonization was in Perth and that he had all this history already behind it. See, I never knew, I never knew. Interesting, okay, okay, let's keep going. In fact, the early colonists in Western Australia were heavily dependent on the Nungar for survival. since they were all but completely cut off from other settlers. At the time, the only other settlements in Australia were on the east coast, an entire continent away. These early settlers to Western Australia had a pretty miserable part, and that was partly their own doing. They struggled to make a British way of life work in Western Australia's climate, and they were slow to adapt to the conditions they found themselves in. To build the sort of society they wanted, they had to actively fight against Western Australia's geography and ecosystem to establish themselves. It took decades, and... an enormous amount of funding and labor from Britain for the settlers to be able to convert southwestern Australia into the agricultural region it is today. Okay. Now, once the colonists were fully established, they turned on the very people that had helped them survive in those early years. The deaths. We already know that part. All of that, all of this part, it is. the Nungar and the other Aboriginal peoples. As the settlers fenced off Western Australia's most fertile lands for farming, the people that had made them fertile in the first place were driven out by force. Throughout the 1800s, As the colonists slowly explored more of the region, a wave of bloody frontier violence followed close behind, as settlements began spreading north up the west coast. This wave of colonization eventually reached the Kimberley by the 1880s, where pastoralists violently displaced the local peoples to make way for agricultural settlements. That brings us to probably the biggest twist in the Western Australian story. Colonial civilization here was actually much more spread out at one point. We really came in thinking about they're going to be just like, oh, these... crazy wild animals are not allowing people to build and settle and we're getting a I'm getting at least an history lesson with way more details than I've ever listened to we obviously the majority of us that are in Europe we know like very, very lightly a detail or two of the stuff that happened and the timeline, but we don't really go really deep when we study this part of history, because it depends also from country to country. I'm from Portugal, so the connections and like the part of history that we have with Australia, it is very touch and go, but not very, very deep. But we just get like a little bit of it. Gosh, guys. History, right? As waves of new settlers came to Western Australia, many drawn by a gold rush in the 1890s, many of them eventually settled into agriculture, accelerating the spread of agricultural communities across Western Australia. But most of Western Australia just couldn't support the growth of European-style agriculture, which meant that this way of life had a hard limit. Outside of Perth and its neighbors, settlements just didn't have the potential to grow. The rural population in Western Australia peaked in 1927, and by the early 2000s, it had shrunk to just half of what it had once been. In the intervening years, agriculture... One thing, for example, that it's very, very popular in Portugal. I remember in my parents, like, when my parents were young, I could have been Australian because my parents already had my sister and... Australia were they were trying to get more people to move in because there were not a lot of people moving there so they needed people to work, they needed people to populate the cities and there were a lot of like incentives for people to move to Australia and even like political stuff and political like helps and ways that make easier for people to move in. So I know this story my parents told me that my father actually got an opportunity and an offer to move to Australia to start living there and bring obviously not just him, but like to bring the whole family, my mom, my sister and like to start a life there. They didn't accept it, so I could be Australian and my life could be very different than it is right now. My English could be way better than it is right now. But yeah, I know that in maybe the 70, no, this was already the 80s, the 80s and the 70s, there were a lot of like, a big attempt from Australia to bring more people in. Culture hit a wall and began to decline, while mining and manufacturing grew. Improvements in technology and stagnant growth caused rural communities to shrink, and Western Australia's population steadily concentrated in Perth and its neighbors. Nowadays, a staggering 80% of Western Australia's people live in Perth, and the rest of the state has been left mostly empty. But why? With all of our technology in 2026, why has Australia still not been able to fully settle Western Australia? Growth and sustainability. On their own, the factors that we've already looked at do a pretty good job of justifying why Western Australia is so weak. It makes sense, yeah. From extreme climates and rugged terrain to poor soil and unreliable rainfall, the environment alone throws up a ton of barriers to modern urban and agricultural development. Agriculture couldn't support the growth of settlements across much of the state. and the past 100 or so years of development have concentrated Western Australia's population in Perth. Jobs and people have flocked to Perth as the hub of development in Western Australia, and the geography across practically the entire rest of the state has kept other settlements from growing into alternative hubs. But there's even more factors behind Western Australia's emptiness than that. For one thing, Western Australia just doesn't have that many people to go around. The entire state is home to just over 3 million people. There's more than 100 individual cities around the world with more people living in them than in Western Australia. Like, 3 million is not that bad, guys. Come on. I'm from Portugal, and I think we are just like 11 million there in the whole country. So, but once again, Portugal, it's tiny compared with Australia. But 3 million is okay. It's okay. I guess it's just weird that it's 3 million, and the majority of them, like 80 % of them are in Perth. So there's not many people to go around in the whole area, and there's not, for sure, a lot of other villages and cities where people can travel and go. In Australia. including Australia's own eastern cities of Melbourne and Sydney. And if we compare it to US states, 33 states, and the territory of Puerto Rico, each have a larger population. Wow. Western Australia is pretty desolate. For a state that makes up a third of the country by landmass, 3 million people is a pretty small chunk of Australia's total population of about 28 million. Which means Australia's population is overwhelmingly concentrated in the east. And that's not just a statistic, but also... also a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. But from those 25 million, how many are in the main cities we saw in the beginning? Does anyone know that number? Let me know in the comments. Prophecy. It means that jobs, culture, and land that's already been developed to support a modern way of life are also concentrated there. In other words, almost everything that would entice immigrants to Australia. All of Australia's national infrastructure is concentrated in the East, too, which historically has left Western Australia both geographically and culturally isolated. That isolation is another big factor, although not as much as it used to be.…