ABSTRACT
If the essential Canada is a long, narrow east-west belt of settlement along the northern edge of the USA, Australia is a number of separate ‘islands’ of settlement spaced at considerable intervals along the southeast coast of the country, plus one (Perth) in the west. The settlement of Australia by the British is even more recent than the settlement of Canada by the French. The indigenous population of Australia was not equip-ped technologically to resist British conquest and was so small in number that it was easily relegated to remote areas or, as in Tasmania, wiped out. Australia was not organised fully as a single entity until 1901, when the Commonwealth of Australia was created. For example, there was no uniform gauge of railway for all the colonies. The ‘emptiness’ of Australia is underlined by the fact that after more than 200 years it still has only 18 million inhabitants, in spite of an almost uninterrupted though comparatively small flow of migrants from the British Isles up to the Second World War, topped up by other Europeans since then. That population is not expected to increase in the next three decades by more than a few million.
