Almost no one lives in the middle of Australia
A country the size of the continental US, and the map of where people actually live looks like a thin bracelet around the edge.
Australia is the driest inhabited continent on Earth. About seventy percent of it is arid or semi-arid, and roughly ninety-five percent of Australians live within a hundred kilometers of the coast — a global average is closer to forty percent. Fly from Perth to Sydney and you can cross the entire width of the country without seeing a town.
Tim Marshall opens The Power of Geography with Australia precisely because that emptiness isn't trivia, it's strategy. A nation with almost its whole population and economy pinned to a coastal rim has a different relationship to the sea, to trade routes, and to whoever controls the water beyond that rim, than a nation with people spread evenly across its territory. Marshall's larger argument, across ten countries, is that terrain still writes the opening moves of geopolitics — before ideology, before alliances, before anyone gives a speech.
It's easy to think of geography as background scenery for the real story, which is politics. Marshall's point is that the scenery is running the story.
Australia didn't choose to be an island continent that's mostly desert. It just has to keep being one.