Why Western Australia Is Almost Completely Empty

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. 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. 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 steppes, and hummock 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 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, 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. Just check the link in the description below. Hemmed 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 Jarrah forests in the south, the wide grasslands of the Avon wheatbelt 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? 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. Then, as a one-two punch out, cold, dry winds moving up the west coast from Antarctica parch the air. The warm Leeuwin Current, which flows down from the tropical Indian Ocean, offsets 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 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 longer than almost any other landmass on Earth. Parts of it date back to the Archean Eon, with exposed rock that's 3.8 billion years old, making it some of the Earth's first-ever continental crust. The oldest minerals in 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 Craton, 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 habitat that countless unique species have adapted to, 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 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 Sohul, while much of the Indonesian archipelago formed the landmass of Sunda. Ancient humans traveling across Southeast Asia were able to between Sunda and Sohul 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 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 the 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 Noongar people. In fact, the early colonists in Western Australia were heavily dependent on the Noongar 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 in Western Australia had a pretty miserable time, 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 were the settlers to be able to convert southwestern Australia into the agricultural region it is today. Now, once the colonists were fully established, they turned on the very people that had helped them survive in those early years, the Noongar 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 than it is today. 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 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? On their own, the factors that we've already looked at do a pretty good job of justifying why Western Australia is so empty. 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 hundred 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, including Australia's own eastern cities of Melbourne and Sydney. And if we compare it to U.S. states, 33 states and the territory of Puerto Rico each have a larger population. Even by Australian standards, 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 a bit of a self-fulfilling 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. Perth is the single most isolated major city in the world, and it's closer to Jakarta in Indonesia than Canberra, the Australian capital. That distance might mean less in the age of air travel and the internet than it did a hundred years ago, but it still makes development more of a hurdle. Especially in a place like Western Australia, where modern development means actively fighting geography. Western Australia's geography and climate can only support so many people, and the demands of what we consider a modern life tighten that limit. Historically, indigenous communities have thrived across virtually every corner of Western Australia, but their success largely comes down to having a way of life that's adapted to the land. What most people would think of as a modern civilization was developed for a radically different set of geographic and environmental circumstances than what Western Australia has to offer. As the area around Perth shows, it's possible to adapt the land to fit that way of life, but only to an extent. Theoretically, it would still be possible to more extensively develop and populate Western Australia, but there also isn't any incentive to actually do so. After all, Australia is hardly the most crowded country on the planet. After Mongolia, it has the world's second lowest population density, with its roughly 28 million people spread across almost 3 million square miles of territory. There's plenty of elbow room left in the parts of Australia that already are developed, so there isn't any pressure to begin developing new areas. Right now, the population centers Australia already has are sufficient, and that's not likely to change anytime soon. Barring that sort of population crunch, it would take huge economic incentives to justify all the work and resources that would go into settling more of Western Australia, and there aren't any of those either. The scattering of small settlements beyond the Perth area are enough to support existing industries, and most of Australia's west coast is pretty far from the Indian Ocean's big trade routes, so there's really no need for a large port either. So, at the end of the day, the reason why Western Australia is so empty outside of Perth is simple. Outside of Perth, there just really isn't anything people would want to live there for, and plenty of reasons to live pretty much anywhere else. Between the geographic challenges and the climate, it's really more amazing that anyone lives in Western Australia at all, that people have made a living there for tens of thousands of years, stands as one of humanity's greatest accomplishments, and modern Perth stands as one of the most unique and fascinating major cities in the world because of that same geography. Once again, now's your chance to get rid of those pesky ads and sponsors. Go get a full free month of our geography community at thebyte.co. You'll even get extra and exclusive articles and videos. Link is in the description below. I hope you enjoyed learning all about Western Australia. If you did, be sure to check out this video all about the Horn of Africa. Thanks for watching, see you next time.