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G4EBT > DESERT 14.03.03 03:09l 144 Lines 6168 Bytes #999 (0) @ WW
BID : AC0794G4EBT
Read: DB0FHN GUEST
Subj: Re: I wonder why?
Path: DB0FHN<DB0RGB<OK0PPL<RZ6HXA<SP7MGD<ON0BEL<GB7FCR
Sent: 030314/0124Z @:GB7FCR.#16.GBR.EU #:50765 [Blackpool] FBB-7.03a $:AC0794G4
From: G4EBT@GB7FCR.#16.GBR.EU
To : DESERT@WW
Bob, VK6BE wrote:-
> David, G4EBT has being making a big thing of the fact that most of
> Australia's population is near the coast. That is true but it got me
> thinking.
I'm not making a big thing of it - you are. I've described the geography
of Australia as shown on the map. Apart from your (mainly) coastal cities,
where 84.5% of your people live, there's only one person per 2.6kM.
That's a FACT, not an opinion.
Australia has an area of 7.6 Million sq km, and a population of only
19.1M.
> But isn't the following true
> The vast majority of the English population lives ON or very near the
> coast as in Australia.
No it isn't true. I can only ask you to do what I've told you to do
with Australia - Look at a map, and you'll see just how wrong you are.
The UK is tiny - only 242,000 sq km, just 3% the size of Oz, but has a
population of 59.4 Million, three times that of Oz. Almost the whole of
the UK is habitable, and it has one of the highest population densities
in the world, 243 per square kM, compared to 2 per Sq km in Oz.
The UK urban population density at 89.5% is one of the highest in the
world, but Australia at 84.5% isn't far behind. The difference is that
almost the whole of the UK is inhabited. That's not the case in Oz, for
obvious reasons, which was the original thread of this now tiresome
debate: DESERTS!
At its widest part England is little more than 300kM (170 miles or so),
wide. From Hull on the north east coast, to the Liverpool on the west
coast, is only 125 miles (225 kM) - little over two hours by car along
the M62 motorway.
The "vast majority" do not live on the coast - they live inland, but
hardly anywhere in England is more than 80 miles from the coast.
England is characterised by large inland urban conurbations which grew up
during the industrial revolution. They almost all blend into one another,
with little open country between them. EG:
West Midlands: Birmingham, Wolverhampton, Walsall, Coventry etc.
East Midlands: Leicester, Derby, Northampton, Nottingham.
South Yorkshire: Sheffield, Rotherham, Barnsley.
West Yorkshire: Leeds, Bradford, Huddersfield, Halifax.
Manchester, Rochdale, Stockport, Bolton, Bury.
Liverpool, Warrington, Widnes.
Middlesbrough (Teeside) Newcastle (Tyneside)
Not to mention London and the South East.
Coastal towns are generally ports or docks such as Hull, Immingham and
Grimsby, (which handle 20% of UK freight between them). Then there's the
port of London, Felixstowe, Liverpool, Bristol etc. There are also some
holiday resorts on the coast, but in UK terms these are just small towns.
As well as the big conurbations, the whole country inland is peppered with
small towns such as York, Beverley, Harrogate, Norwich, Newark, Grantham,
Mansfield, Oxford, Cambridge, ad infinitum.
> Why? Is it, as David says of inland regions in Australia the fact that
> the interior is inhospitable? Or is it, as in Australia, the fact that
> people go to live where the work is, and the major part of the
> financial, industrial and business world tends to group in large
> cities, usually near a port?
This gets more bizarre by the day. Look on the map. Deserts, deserts,
deserts, deserts! The USA is a fifth larger than Oz, at 9.4 Mill Sq KM,
but has a population 14 times that of Australia, 270 million.
Only 77% of people in the US live in an urban environment. If the climatic
conditions in Oz were as favourable as in the US, it's highly probable
that much more of Oz would have been populated and brought into productive
use. It hasn't been. Why? It's desert! That's why Oz has only 2 people per
sq km, and the U.S. has FIFTEEN TIMES that number.
> What % of the population of England lives in London, Liverpool,
> Newcastle on Tyne.
> Manchester (close to the coast),
> Hull, Swansea,
> Bristol???.
Find out for yourself if you want to - I'm not going to do your sums for
you, I've done enough of that already. Manchester is an inland city, and
few here would say "it's close to the coast". However, it is only 50km
from the west coast, which only serves to confirm how narrow the UK is.
> What proportion of the US population lives in New York, San Francisco,
> Los Angeles, the coastal cities of Florida and the east coast, and the
> city ports on the Great Lakes?
See above stats re the US, that might give you a clue.
> Why pick on Australia? Because it has a small population??
> It seems to me that something near the same %s apply to other
> countries too.
Not to the UK, but what is your point?
No-one's "picking on" Australia - there's nothing wrong with Australia.
This all started when you gave a wildly inaccurate description of it
because some hapless guy who - unlike me, has had the good sense to
move on, said you had a lot of deserts. What you said was:
> It has some desert country, yes, but it also has forest areas, snow
> country, and the climate varies from cool temperate to tropical, with
> tropical grasslands in the north west, and tropical forests in the north
> east. the climate in the north is monsoonal, and most of the south is
> Mediterranean.
I wouldn't take issue with that statement, except the grossly understated
term "it has some deserts, yes". It has millions of square km's of deserts
- some of the largest in the world. It has more deserts than anything.
That isn't an insult, it's a geographical fact.
They haven't got any smaller since you set out on this voyage of
discovery.
Somone's going to have to have to draw a line under this one, and it
clearly isn't going to be Bob, so I'll have to do it. There's lots more
socio-economic and demographic data about Australia that could be the
subject of an interesting debate, but unless people can raise their game
a little, it becomes rather pointless.
73 - David, G4EBT @ GB7FCR
Eddystone User Group Member
G-QRP Club Member No: 1339
QTH: Cottingham, East Yorkshire.
david@crofters89.freeserve.co.uk
Message timed: 01:15 on 2003-Mar-14
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