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Australia has not yielded readily to development by Europeans. Even on the relatively favoured eastern periphery, the first European settlers were perplexed by the environment. Later, when they penetrated the mountains of the Great Dividing Range, they had to fight even harder against searing droughts, sudden floods, and voracious bushfires. They also continued to clash, often ruthlessly, with Aboriginal communities. Pioneer settlers took pride in conquering the continent’s prodigious distances, and that became a national trait. The spread of railway networks in the latter part of the 19th century and the subsequent introduction of the automobile, the airplane, radio, television, and the Internet gradually reduced the friction of distance, but the conquest was far from complete even by the beginning of the 21st century.
Rural settlement
The most densely populated 1 percent of the country contains nearly seven-eighths of Australia’s total population. Since the early 19th century, the terms Outback, Interior, and Coastal (also Fringe, or Fertile Crescent) have been popular titles for the three broad regions of settlement. The term bush is applied indiscriminately to most rural or isolated districts regardless of their stage or type of development.
Extensive arid and semiarid areas in Western Australia, Northern Territory, and South Australia are routinely labeled as actually or virtually uninhabited. This description also applies to remote sections of west-central Queensland and to scattered patches of dry or mountainous wilderness in Victoria, New South Wales, and Tasmania. On the northern and central mainland some large Aboriginal reserves punctuate the open territory.
In the more useful but still arid and semiarid country, enormous cattle and sheep stations are held under complex leasehold arrangements. Property sizes generally range between 30 and 5,800 square miles (80 and 15,000 square km). Many of the larger holdings are now controlled by Australian banks and investment firms or by large domestic and foreign companies, though original pioneering families are still represented. The fulcrum of the typical big station is a compact base comprising the homestead headquarters and separate buildings for the manager, overseer, general and specialized workers, garage and machine shops, butchery, shearing shed, and small airstrip. These pastoral hamlets typically accommodate between 15 and 50 individuals; a few widely scattered huts or cottages might be available for outlying workers. Thus, the private enterprise development of areas much larger than some U.S. states or groups of English counties is essentially in the keeping of small groups of tightly focused communities—albeit under leasehold, not freehold, tenures.
The gradual improvement in the quantity and reliability of rainfall from this difficult interior to the coast is not uniform, but it is a noticeable tendency and is accompanied by progressively denser settlement. A standard sequence begins with wheat and sheep farming on the drier margins and moves on to more-specialized wheat production and intensive livestock enterprises, dairy farming, and market gardening. Roughly equivalent gradations may be traced in the spacing of properties—for example, from large wheat-sheep enterprises that may exceed 2,500 acres (about 1,000 hectares) held in a mixture of freehold and leasehold tenures down to freehold dairy farms and market gardens using about 100 acres (40 hectares) apiece and often much less than that. Irrigation developments interrupt the sequence in all states.
A combination of government enterprise and the initiatives of pioneer families had established the main outlines of this framework by World War I in the older states and a little later in Queensland and Western Australia. The existence of characteristic Australian farming and grazing belts from state to state can be exaggerated, but, to the extent that these exist, they are the product of common objectives in settlement policy and represent a gradual clarification, by people and governments, of the importance of regional environmental quality.
Prominent mining centres such as Mount Isa in Queensland and Broken Hill in New South Wales are exceptions to the rule that sizable towns cannot be supported in the Outback. But over the country as a whole, remarkably few Australians live in the rural districts, despite their national economic importance and their stereotyped images overseas. Small service centres are distributed through every region in proportion to the intensity of rural production. Insulated yet also restricted by remoteness, the economies of most of the larger towns incorporate food and fibre processing and assorted light industries. Several towns have been assisted by state and federal decentralization policies aimed largely at reducing the extraordinary concentration in the state and territorial capitals.
Aboriginal land rights campaigners in Northern Territory and in Western Australia and South Australia have achieved significant successes, contributing to the Australianization of the wider national Aboriginal community. Perhaps it is only a slight exaggeration to state that, taken in conjunction with decisions made at state and federal levels to begin rehabilitating soils and vegetation ravaged by two centuries of aggressive European settlement, the process signified the dawning recognition of a binding moral imperative. The Aboriginal communities that have been awarded freehold or near-freehold rights over extensive areas have been made well aware that their management skills are under close observation. On the other hand, a stirring nationwide “reconciliation” has held out the promise of improved relationships.
Urban settlement
Despite the continuing significance of farming, grazing, and mining activities that have shaped most of Australia’s landscapes and contributed so much to its distinctive history, Australia is statistically among the most-urbanized countries in the world. Whereas more than two-fifths of Australia’s population lived in rural areas in 1911, by the 1970s that proportion had declined to about one-seventh. At the beginning of the 21st century, urbanization had slowed, but nearly nine-tenths of the population is officially described as urban. Statistics, however, mask part of the story, not taking into account the peculiar role of “the bush” in the Australian psyche. In any event, “suburban” is a better description of the lifestyles of the bulk of the Australian population.
The metropolitan centres and provincial towns are almost entirely the products of growth since the 19th century, and, in their low-density living and dependence on the automobile, they resemble North American rather than European creations. Yet close inspection of the legacies of colonial town planning and of some assertive architectural preferences suggests a certain hybridization of international influences. Canberra, the federal capital, differs from each of the other rapidly growing centres in its heavy emphasis on planning. The American architect Walter Burley Griffin produced the original design, and construction began in 1913. Canberra’s planners harnessed rather than changed the national preference for suburban sprawl, but the city’s broad avenues, artificial lake, and prestigious public buildings and monuments—including a striking Parliament House, completed in 1988—have maintained its conspicuous individuality.