Out of the comments on one of my recent posts, it probably is worth just pointing out how vastly empty most of Australia is. We're reasonably close in size areawise to:

* the "lower 48" (contiguous US of A states)

* China

* All of Europe from the mediterranean to the barents, from UK to the border of Russia.

* Brazil

(check it out on https://www.thetruesize.com/)

... and yet, all the dark gray on this map is area which contains precisely zero people.

The sprinkling of yellow dust contains an extremely low "less than 500 people per square kilometer", and honestly most of that is far less than that. The teeny splashes of red are mostly the 6 state capitals plus a small handful of regional cities, most of which are on the east cost, plus Canberra and Launceston.

I do love doing the drive from Brisbane to Cairns, and I also love the drive down to Sydney and Melbourne, but I also love that I can do those drives (which are like 20 hours long) and maybe go through only a dozen or so towns or cities along the way, and most of those are like four blocks long where you briefly drop down from 100 to 50km/hr, then less than a minute later you're through and back up at 100 again.

https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/e2eac66d11984d0e86e6d795b0ca0eec