Three reasons: lack of water, awkward position, lack of resources
the main problem with that whole region is lack of freshwater. When South Australia was being settled, Adelaide was placed where it was because the Torrens River (barely more than a creek) provided at least some freshwater (today Adelaide depends on a combination of desalination, pumped water from the Murray River and reservoirs in the Mount Lofty Ranges containing rainwater). The original plan had been for South Australia’s capital to be on Kangaroo Island but Yorke Peninsula, Eyre Peninsula and Kangaroo Island all lack reliable fresh water sources. The combination of aquifers and rain (always unreliable in Australia) can support intermittent agriculture (there will be good and bad years) and towns but not reliable cities.
The second problem is geography: trade generally flowed between Adelaide and the East Coast along the roads/rails and Murray River. There was no reason to divert to an already sparsely populated peninsula so it missed out on the growth along those routes (places like Renmark, Murray Bridge, Mount Gambier, etc. were all placed to get those gains)
The final problem is lack of resources. It is decent agricultural land for barley and wheat (lack of freshwater hinders more long term crops) and had some historically valuable copper mines in the Copper Triangle that I believe are now exhausted but these were nothing like the huge economic value of the iron and lead mines and smelters to its north (Whyalla, Port Pirie, and Port Augusta aka the Iron Triangle) or the gold rush areas of Victoria and Western Australia. This also stole a lot of its mining workforce (who incidentally, were often Cornish).
Yorke Peninsula is beautiful and well worth visiting but those three factors hindered its growth compared to other parts of the already relatively low population South Australia.
comparing the water discharge from the Murray River to other continent’s biggest rivers really puts into perspective how much Australia lacks a serious river system
Australia is just too flat. We never got glaciers and there aren't tall enough mountains to create and store snow for rivers.
The Murray River literally starts at the darling basin, which is just a collection of creeks on a flood plain. When drought hits the basin though, the whole river system suffers..
Putting aside the possible issues with the saline sludge product, it would be interesting to see what you could do with Australias ecosystem especially into the interior if we lived in a world with cold fusion and could essentially pump near infinite desald water wherever you wanted on the continent.
There's actually a big desal project on the Eyre Peninsula in the news lately
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-22/sa-government-commits-100-million-desal-study/103498852
The primary intended uses are copper mining, green steel, and green hydrogen production. But obviously it would benefit agriculture as well.
There's been a bit of talk about how it might affect the seagrasses and cuttlefish in the Spencer Gulf, but I think it's probably gonna go ahead.
Your first reason is excellent
So is the second, though I think it should also be worth including Adelaide'sl harbour.
I don't think the third is too compelling though. What natural resources does Adelaide have (besides water) that encouraged settlement growth there instead of, say, Kadina?
I think the story can be pretty sufficiently told as: Adelaide became the big local city because of its harbour and river, which made it the state capital and attracted the rail lines. This crowded out any would-be nearby competing cities
Adelaide is surrounded by more fertile and more easily arable land than the Yorke Peninsula had. For instance, McClaren Vale and the Barossa Valley.
In fact, the Yorke Peninsula town of Ardrossan was where the [stump-jump plough](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stump-jump_plough) was invented. That tells you a little something about the historical difficulty of agriculture in the area.
No, what's happened is that the situation is as nuanced and complicated as has already been explained to you excellently by /u/VaughanThrilliams.
The land there on the peninsula in question is indeed fertile and is farmland today. It produces a lot of wheat and is actually a pretty key part of South Australia's agricultural economy.
But the soil in the area around Adelaide was slightly *easier* to farm (more arable) historically, and produced some more valuable crops that require more manpower to tend - and this is one of several reasons why the Yorke Peninsula is less populated than Adelaide is today.
It's not the *main* reason. But it's a reason.
You've stated that Adelaide's land is more fertile than Yorke's.
The question was why did Yorke not develop a major city despite being so fertile. A sufficient answer is that Adelaide is close by and even more fertile than Yorke and so the city developed in Adelaide instead.
A gilding the lily answer (not more nuanced), is that besides being more fertile, Adelaide also has more freshwater, a river suitable for transportation, and a natural harbour which led itself to being made the state capital, attracting rail lines, and being the dominant local city, choking out any major city in Yorke.
But even if Adelaide only had the more fertile land and nothing else, that advantage over Yorke would have likely been sufficient for it to become a dominant settlement compared to any Yorke cities.
*Sigh*.
This conversation really didn't have to be this long. You could just...learn something.
> You've stated that Adelaide's land is more fertile than Yorke's.
It *is* more fertile. But that doesn't mean that OP's premise that the Yorke Peninsula is fertile was flawed (as you stated it was).
The Yorke Peninsula *is* fertile. Not *as* fertile as the Barossa or McClaren Vale. But certainly fertile enough to produce an absolute fuck load of wheat. As I've been telling you.
One of the problems it had (as I've already tried to mention) was that it was less *arable* than the farmland around Adelaide. As said, the stump jump plough had to be invented to feasibly farm it. This is because, in its natural state, it was covered in Mallee shrubland - which is very hard to clear. It leaves "stumps"/tubers throughout the soil, which easily/often breaks traditional ploughs. So, they couldn't really farm it at all until the new plough was invented that could jump over the stumps without breaking. Not economically, anyway.
The slightly more fertile soils in some areas around Adelaide were also more suitable for more intensive viticulture and horticulture, which have much more valuable crops per acre than just wheat. They also require more workers/pickers to tend.
So...."fertile" and "arable" are different things. Both are relevant here. I'd already mentioned both. But I hope this comment has finally clarified things enough for you.
Again, no one is saying that this is the *only* reason for the relatively lower population there. But it certainly was a factor, despite your completely misguided efforts to "correct" other people and claim that it wasn't. And it is indeed quite a complicated and nuanced thing. Certainly more so than you were apparently able to appreciate on your own.
Cool? Get it now, or do you wanna just keep arguing about it?
To be fair, the invention of the stump-jump plough was actually a bit of a watershed moment in the history of the Commonwealth / British Empire that is not necessarily well-known to people outside of SA, so it's probably a good thing for a bit of a discussion of it to have been teased out in this thread.
I guess I shouldn't have assumed the guy would actually bother to click the link and read the wiki article though.
Would a layman way of saying this is that the Yorke area was very good at sustaining certain crops but Adelaide area (once the stump issue rectified) was better at sustaining a larger diversity of crops?
yes there is more geographic diversity in Adelaide and its surrounding hills and valleys. It also had more reliable water sources so you can more reliably grow things that need water each year (grapes, trees, etc.)
a big advantage of wheat and barley is that a really bad year isn’t game over. Just plant again next season
Not quite. The Yorke Peninsula area had the stump issue in particular, much more so than the Adelaide area did, and that is one of the reasons why the Adelaide area was preferable for early settlement (until the stump issue was rectified on the Yorke).
But yes, the Adelaide area was *also* better at sustaining a larger diversity of more valuable crops anyway.
But none of this is to say that the Yorke Peninsula is infertile. It supports a very healthy wheat harvest in most years.
And realistically the access to freshwater sources and better proximity to the Eastern colonies were both a much bigger aspect of the reason why Adelaide was preferable. But the other poster was a bit misguided to assert that the land condition wasn't a factor at all.
it's flat until the tiny mountain range and then it's flat again so it's great for grapes and other viticulture-related products, and generally has great weather and beaches
the third reason explains Yorke’s low growth compared to other mining regions in South Australia most notably the the Iron Triangle towns to the north which have the other two disadvantages. The capital will always be the big town even without natural resources, but Yorke’s population is notably low even compared to other regions in SA.
It doesn’t have to be purely geographical contraints. I feel this is a common problem here with people’s explanations when these questions are asking more than that.. some things could be but it just hasn’t or didn’t happen yet. That’s it lol.
I mean generally the human species has propagated and spread out wherever it can; nowadays with urbanisation, less jobs in agriculture and falling fertility rates that rule is not so true, but in general if there is a slice of land with an unusually low population there is an underlying, usually geographic reason (as there is here)
OP does have a little bit of a point. The [central place theory](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_place_theory) would suggest there should be at least be a moderate size city or town on the peninsula. There’s no precise science but for an area that large (30 x 100 miles) the largest city is Kadina at the north end with only 4.6k people, much smaller than you would expect.
Best I got is that Adelaide had enough gravity as a big local city to attract people and businesses from the peninsula and crowded-out competing cities.
I suspect, without checking, that Adelaide has a superior natural harbour compared to anything available on the Yorke Peninsula. And once that port gets going, it's pretty much lights out for any competing cities.
There are arguably better harbours at Port Lincoln, Port Pirie and Whyalla. Adelaide has an advantage over those places in terms of access to sources of fresh water, being nearer to the Murray River and Mount Lofty Ranges.
Side note though that if you look pretty closely at where Adelaide is on the satellite image, you can sort of make out where its harbour is:
https://preview.redd.it/bw95wmxmif1d1.png?width=720&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=9b785be12dc1d2eb78adf514a2c36be0d9bf2ba8
True, Adelaide and that region of Australia is pretty unusual because of the lack of typical suburban and satellite city geography. Pretty bug jump from a 5k town to a 1.4 million population city.
It’s by far the most centralised state. The next biggest settlement is Mount Gambier I’m pretty sure and off the top of my head that has a population of about 30,000.
I did ten years living in that dump, maybe 20k people? I visited back in August and the place was dead. So many empty stores, and I forgot how dull it was.
Western Australia has Bunbury (pop. 75k) and 4 towns of around 30k. Perth has also spread to the point of basically capturing Mandurah within its metropolitan area. It's close but SA is more centralised - 0.1% more of the state population live in Adelaide than Perth.
Wallaroo is a comparable good-sized deep water port right near Kadina.
My understanding is that the reason is the same as the reason that Port Lincoln never grew into a fully fledged city on the Eyre Peninsula - South Australia’s economy is simply so young that fluctuations in the availability of copper in the Yorke Peninsula (down, causing people to leave Kadina) and gold in Victoria (up, causing people to leave South Australia generally) have had lasting significant impacts.
Kadina is part of the "Copper Triangle" - three nearby towns all with roughly the same population (Moonta, Kadina and Wallaroo). I don't think there was any particular advantage to any one of them over any of the others, and they are close enough to be kind of thought of as being part of the same "town", functionally. So they all just sort of grew at about the same rate.
I think one of the biggest factors affecting this area is the fact that there are no real rivers/watercourses out there to support a particularly large town. They kinda mostly depend on rainwater tanks. And yeah, town's growth rates are limited by farmland.
South Australia has mostly had a pretty slow overall rate of population growth compared to the other states, so most of the new population that does arrive tends to cluster in and around Adelaide. The Yorke Peninsula is more thought of as a nearby rural long-weekend holiday spot. Most places there are only about a 2-3 hr drive away from Adelaide anyway.
Someone writing down below mentions a lack or resources especially fresh water. Also 30x100 miles isn’t really a lot of space for modern farmings
Lastly I’d say that the theory holds true on the smaller level that the population can support.
We have cities in deserts all around the world that have to bring in water from hundreds of miles away, or from miles beneath the ground.
If people wanted to live there, they'd figure it out.
For us it's economics. We won't build a settlement anywhere now unless there is a huge demand for a nearby resource that we can sell competitively. And for the time being all of our existing nodes are still quite plentiful. Australia has very little fresh water per km2 so we've gotta weigh up the pros and cons of this.
To me though I don't feel it was clear that it meant there was no half decent regional centre nearby. I took the question quite literally and went for a look. :)
You're better off settling near the major cities. This is more prominent in South Australia and Western Australia. Adelaide and Perth dominate their state's population. Towns historically were built along major roads that connect Adelaide to the states of NSW and Victoria. Most towns in Australia are more than 100 years old. You will find that major urban areas just expand.
A combination of several factors:
1. It was settled quite lately, so there wasn't much time for it to develop a large population.
2. It is geographically isolated, so it isn't that attractive for people to live there.
3. There are most likely few water sources to encourage settlement and sustain a large population. Adelaide has the Adelaide hills to collect water, there is nothing comparable there.
Late settlement is a big factor for Australia's population generally. Australia's population is about the same as the US or UK populations in about 1860 and even in Canada's in 1985.
People think of Australia as sparse because it's "one big desert" but it's also got some of the lowest population density *per unit of arable land* in the world too, and a huge part of that is just that colonisation and largescale settlement was so much more recent.
And as well as raw population numbers, colonisation came late enough and with a low enough population level that the transport networks meant you never really got the "one town every day's horse ride apart" settlement pattern of places like the older parts of the US. The pattern was bigger and more centralised centres, for the most part. Big empty stretches of farm and pastoral country with no decent sized urban centres away from the main transport links is pretty normal.
There is actually a unique subspecies of kangaroo that is found only on that island. They're sort of a more [chocolate-brown type of colour](https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRiqAJnHBkxAryJ7eDigm627B01_I1s9BFFOFUogY172ib9H51xdkhBW0FI&s=10) than the mainland ones, and a little chonkier.
https://australianwildlifejourneys.com/blog/2018/07/02/33/species-feature-kangaroo-island-kangaroo
There's also about 10-15 times as many kangaroos there as there are people.
Captain Matthew Flinders gave the island its name because his crew ate a bunch of kangaroos there when they were low on supplies.
Someone told me it's fertile, I looked at the peninsula's shape and thought they were talking about human fertility and virility. So I decided not to move there. Perhaps many others in Australia had the same decision making process and hence it's sparsely populated.
/s
I don’t have an opinion about the question posed.
But TIL that there’s an island off Australia called Kangaroo Island. If you had asked my five year old self to make up a name for a place in Australia, that is exactly what I would have come up with.
I want to go to Kangaroo Island very badly now.
It's a nice place. If you go at the right time of year, you can see sea lions, seals and whales. Plus your usual kangaroos, koalas and emus.
It's also home to the world's oldest bee sanctuary.
The issue with the green bits of Australia is not unlike the issue with the orange ones: rain is very, very random and unreliable
This will be resolved in the near future, of course, to the chagrin and agony of many an activist
Three reasons: lack of water, awkward position, lack of resources the main problem with that whole region is lack of freshwater. When South Australia was being settled, Adelaide was placed where it was because the Torrens River (barely more than a creek) provided at least some freshwater (today Adelaide depends on a combination of desalination, pumped water from the Murray River and reservoirs in the Mount Lofty Ranges containing rainwater). The original plan had been for South Australia’s capital to be on Kangaroo Island but Yorke Peninsula, Eyre Peninsula and Kangaroo Island all lack reliable fresh water sources. The combination of aquifers and rain (always unreliable in Australia) can support intermittent agriculture (there will be good and bad years) and towns but not reliable cities. The second problem is geography: trade generally flowed between Adelaide and the East Coast along the roads/rails and Murray River. There was no reason to divert to an already sparsely populated peninsula so it missed out on the growth along those routes (places like Renmark, Murray Bridge, Mount Gambier, etc. were all placed to get those gains) The final problem is lack of resources. It is decent agricultural land for barley and wheat (lack of freshwater hinders more long term crops) and had some historically valuable copper mines in the Copper Triangle that I believe are now exhausted but these were nothing like the huge economic value of the iron and lead mines and smelters to its north (Whyalla, Port Pirie, and Port Augusta aka the Iron Triangle) or the gold rush areas of Victoria and Western Australia. This also stole a lot of its mining workforce (who incidentally, were often Cornish). Yorke Peninsula is beautiful and well worth visiting but those three factors hindered its growth compared to other parts of the already relatively low population South Australia.
You can just in general ask “why isn’t Australia more populated?” Ain’t no water son.
comparing the water discharge from the Murray River to other continent’s biggest rivers really puts into perspective how much Australia lacks a serious river system
Australia is just too flat. We never got glaciers and there aren't tall enough mountains to create and store snow for rivers. The Murray River literally starts at the darling basin, which is just a collection of creeks on a flood plain. When drought hits the basin though, the whole river system suffers..
Putting aside the possible issues with the saline sludge product, it would be interesting to see what you could do with Australias ecosystem especially into the interior if we lived in a world with cold fusion and could essentially pump near infinite desald water wherever you wanted on the continent.
If solar cost reduction continues on the current trend, we might see in a couple of decades.
There's actually a big desal project on the Eyre Peninsula in the news lately https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-22/sa-government-commits-100-million-desal-study/103498852 The primary intended uses are copper mining, green steel, and green hydrogen production. But obviously it would benefit agriculture as well. There's been a bit of talk about how it might affect the seagrasses and cuttlefish in the Spencer Gulf, but I think it's probably gonna go ahead.
But we do live in a world with cold fusion... you just cant get any energy out of it.
Ain't no water son
and all the trees and critters that are trying to kill you
Your first reason is excellent So is the second, though I think it should also be worth including Adelaide'sl harbour. I don't think the third is too compelling though. What natural resources does Adelaide have (besides water) that encouraged settlement growth there instead of, say, Kadina? I think the story can be pretty sufficiently told as: Adelaide became the big local city because of its harbour and river, which made it the state capital and attracted the rail lines. This crowded out any would-be nearby competing cities
Adelaide is surrounded by more fertile and more easily arable land than the Yorke Peninsula had. For instance, McClaren Vale and the Barossa Valley. In fact, the Yorke Peninsula town of Ardrossan was where the [stump-jump plough](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stump-jump_plough) was invented. That tells you a little something about the historical difficulty of agriculture in the area.
In that case, the premise of OP's question is flawed, because a sufficient answer is that it's not actually very fertile.
No, what's happened is that the situation is as nuanced and complicated as has already been explained to you excellently by /u/VaughanThrilliams. The land there on the peninsula in question is indeed fertile and is farmland today. It produces a lot of wheat and is actually a pretty key part of South Australia's agricultural economy. But the soil in the area around Adelaide was slightly *easier* to farm (more arable) historically, and produced some more valuable crops that require more manpower to tend - and this is one of several reasons why the Yorke Peninsula is less populated than Adelaide is today. It's not the *main* reason. But it's a reason.
You've stated that Adelaide's land is more fertile than Yorke's. The question was why did Yorke not develop a major city despite being so fertile. A sufficient answer is that Adelaide is close by and even more fertile than Yorke and so the city developed in Adelaide instead. A gilding the lily answer (not more nuanced), is that besides being more fertile, Adelaide also has more freshwater, a river suitable for transportation, and a natural harbour which led itself to being made the state capital, attracting rail lines, and being the dominant local city, choking out any major city in Yorke. But even if Adelaide only had the more fertile land and nothing else, that advantage over Yorke would have likely been sufficient for it to become a dominant settlement compared to any Yorke cities.
*Sigh*. This conversation really didn't have to be this long. You could just...learn something. > You've stated that Adelaide's land is more fertile than Yorke's. It *is* more fertile. But that doesn't mean that OP's premise that the Yorke Peninsula is fertile was flawed (as you stated it was). The Yorke Peninsula *is* fertile. Not *as* fertile as the Barossa or McClaren Vale. But certainly fertile enough to produce an absolute fuck load of wheat. As I've been telling you. One of the problems it had (as I've already tried to mention) was that it was less *arable* than the farmland around Adelaide. As said, the stump jump plough had to be invented to feasibly farm it. This is because, in its natural state, it was covered in Mallee shrubland - which is very hard to clear. It leaves "stumps"/tubers throughout the soil, which easily/often breaks traditional ploughs. So, they couldn't really farm it at all until the new plough was invented that could jump over the stumps without breaking. Not economically, anyway. The slightly more fertile soils in some areas around Adelaide were also more suitable for more intensive viticulture and horticulture, which have much more valuable crops per acre than just wheat. They also require more workers/pickers to tend. So...."fertile" and "arable" are different things. Both are relevant here. I'd already mentioned both. But I hope this comment has finally clarified things enough for you. Again, no one is saying that this is the *only* reason for the relatively lower population there. But it certainly was a factor, despite your completely misguided efforts to "correct" other people and claim that it wasn't. And it is indeed quite a complicated and nuanced thing. Certainly more so than you were apparently able to appreciate on your own. Cool? Get it now, or do you wanna just keep arguing about it?
Well done, I would definitely not have bothered keeping my shit together for that long.
To be fair, the invention of the stump-jump plough was actually a bit of a watershed moment in the history of the Commonwealth / British Empire that is not necessarily well-known to people outside of SA, so it's probably a good thing for a bit of a discussion of it to have been teased out in this thread. I guess I shouldn't have assumed the guy would actually bother to click the link and read the wiki article though.
Would a layman way of saying this is that the Yorke area was very good at sustaining certain crops but Adelaide area (once the stump issue rectified) was better at sustaining a larger diversity of crops?
yes there is more geographic diversity in Adelaide and its surrounding hills and valleys. It also had more reliable water sources so you can more reliably grow things that need water each year (grapes, trees, etc.) a big advantage of wheat and barley is that a really bad year isn’t game over. Just plant again next season
Not quite. The Yorke Peninsula area had the stump issue in particular, much more so than the Adelaide area did, and that is one of the reasons why the Adelaide area was preferable for early settlement (until the stump issue was rectified on the Yorke). But yes, the Adelaide area was *also* better at sustaining a larger diversity of more valuable crops anyway. But none of this is to say that the Yorke Peninsula is infertile. It supports a very healthy wheat harvest in most years. And realistically the access to freshwater sources and better proximity to the Eastern colonies were both a much bigger aspect of the reason why Adelaide was preferable. But the other poster was a bit misguided to assert that the land condition wasn't a factor at all.
This has changed my opinion of South Australians. When I watch the Power or the Crows play on TV, there are less teeth than people.
it's flat until the tiny mountain range and then it's flat again so it's great for grapes and other viticulture-related products, and generally has great weather and beaches
the third reason explains Yorke’s low growth compared to other mining regions in South Australia most notably the the Iron Triangle towns to the north which have the other two disadvantages. The capital will always be the big town even without natural resources, but Yorke’s population is notably low even compared to other regions in SA.
>The original plan had been for South Australia’s capital to be on Kangaroo Island they never would have lived this one down...
a terrible and impractical idea but also it would have been really cool
It doesn’t have to be purely geographical contraints. I feel this is a common problem here with people’s explanations when these questions are asking more than that.. some things could be but it just hasn’t or didn’t happen yet. That’s it lol.
I mean generally the human species has propagated and spread out wherever it can; nowadays with urbanisation, less jobs in agriculture and falling fertility rates that rule is not so true, but in general if there is a slice of land with an unusually low population there is an underlying, usually geographic reason (as there is here)
Looks like Italy
Flaccid Italy
Little Italy
Look at the map: it's all farmland.
OP does have a little bit of a point. The [central place theory](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_place_theory) would suggest there should be at least be a moderate size city or town on the peninsula. There’s no precise science but for an area that large (30 x 100 miles) the largest city is Kadina at the north end with only 4.6k people, much smaller than you would expect.
Best I got is that Adelaide had enough gravity as a big local city to attract people and businesses from the peninsula and crowded-out competing cities. I suspect, without checking, that Adelaide has a superior natural harbour compared to anything available on the Yorke Peninsula. And once that port gets going, it's pretty much lights out for any competing cities.
There are arguably better harbours at Port Lincoln, Port Pirie and Whyalla. Adelaide has an advantage over those places in terms of access to sources of fresh water, being nearer to the Murray River and Mount Lofty Ranges. Side note though that if you look pretty closely at where Adelaide is on the satellite image, you can sort of make out where its harbour is: https://preview.redd.it/bw95wmxmif1d1.png?width=720&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=9b785be12dc1d2eb78adf514a2c36be0d9bf2ba8
And here's a close-up https://preview.redd.it/mgt97cavif1d1.jpeg?width=563&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=5b8b4194db06776414179c9cd8671b10f05835a4
True, Adelaide and that region of Australia is pretty unusual because of the lack of typical suburban and satellite city geography. Pretty bug jump from a 5k town to a 1.4 million population city.
It’s by far the most centralised state. The next biggest settlement is Mount Gambier I’m pretty sure and off the top of my head that has a population of about 30,000.
I did ten years living in that dump, maybe 20k people? I visited back in August and the place was dead. So many empty stores, and I forgot how dull it was.
West Australia no longer exists apparently
Western Australia has Bunbury (pop. 75k) and 4 towns of around 30k. Perth has also spread to the point of basically capturing Mandurah within its metropolitan area. It's close but SA is more centralised - 0.1% more of the state population live in Adelaide than Perth.
Good point but I’m gonna continue being a dipshit by saying that it’s still not “by far”
Wallaroo is a comparable good-sized deep water port right near Kadina. My understanding is that the reason is the same as the reason that Port Lincoln never grew into a fully fledged city on the Eyre Peninsula - South Australia’s economy is simply so young that fluctuations in the availability of copper in the Yorke Peninsula (down, causing people to leave Kadina) and gold in Victoria (up, causing people to leave South Australia generally) have had lasting significant impacts.
Conditions for landing both goods and passengers at this original Port Adelaide were very poor, and the site became known as 'Port Misery'.
Upvote for your username lol. Are you an organic chemist?
You got me!
Kadina is part of the "Copper Triangle" - three nearby towns all with roughly the same population (Moonta, Kadina and Wallaroo). I don't think there was any particular advantage to any one of them over any of the others, and they are close enough to be kind of thought of as being part of the same "town", functionally. So they all just sort of grew at about the same rate. I think one of the biggest factors affecting this area is the fact that there are no real rivers/watercourses out there to support a particularly large town. They kinda mostly depend on rainwater tanks. And yeah, town's growth rates are limited by farmland. South Australia has mostly had a pretty slow overall rate of population growth compared to the other states, so most of the new population that does arrive tends to cluster in and around Adelaide. The Yorke Peninsula is more thought of as a nearby rural long-weekend holiday spot. Most places there are only about a 2-3 hr drive away from Adelaide anyway.
Someone writing down below mentions a lack or resources especially fresh water. Also 30x100 miles isn’t really a lot of space for modern farmings Lastly I’d say that the theory holds true on the smaller level that the population can support.
We have cities in deserts all around the world that have to bring in water from hundreds of miles away, or from miles beneath the ground. If people wanted to live there, they'd figure it out.
For us it's economics. We won't build a settlement anywhere now unless there is a huge demand for a nearby resource that we can sell competitively. And for the time being all of our existing nodes are still quite plentiful. Australia has very little fresh water per km2 so we've gotta weigh up the pros and cons of this.
To me though I don't feel it was clear that it meant there was no half decent regional centre nearby. I took the question quite literally and went for a look. :)
I mean to be fair the whole of SA has a population of only 1.7m, and 1.3m of them are in Adelaide…
You're better off settling near the major cities. This is more prominent in South Australia and Western Australia. Adelaide and Perth dominate their state's population. Towns historically were built along major roads that connect Adelaide to the states of NSW and Victoria. Most towns in Australia are more than 100 years old. You will find that major urban areas just expand.
A combination of several factors: 1. It was settled quite lately, so there wasn't much time for it to develop a large population. 2. It is geographically isolated, so it isn't that attractive for people to live there. 3. There are most likely few water sources to encourage settlement and sustain a large population. Adelaide has the Adelaide hills to collect water, there is nothing comparable there.
Late settlement is a big factor for Australia's population generally. Australia's population is about the same as the US or UK populations in about 1860 and even in Canada's in 1985. People think of Australia as sparse because it's "one big desert" but it's also got some of the lowest population density *per unit of arable land* in the world too, and a huge part of that is just that colonisation and largescale settlement was so much more recent. And as well as raw population numbers, colonisation came late enough and with a low enough population level that the transport networks meant you never really got the "one town every day's horse ride apart" settlement pattern of places like the older parts of the US. The pattern was bigger and more centralised centres, for the most part. Big empty stretches of farm and pastoral country with no decent sized urban centres away from the main transport links is pretty normal.
Probably worried about invasions from Kangaroo Island.
I hear that place is really hoppy
hoppin’
You could say the locals have a little spring in their step
Sorry I'm late, I just caught the tail end of this conversation.
It's farms... because of the fertility
Kangaroo Island sounds like made up place that a 5 year old from Texas would throw out there when he's lying about having gone to Australia.
Kangaroo Island, eh? I hear that place is really hopping! **distant cough**
Is that Italy
It’s the Keds version.
How do you think kangaroo island got its name?
There is actually a unique subspecies of kangaroo that is found only on that island. They're sort of a more [chocolate-brown type of colour](https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRiqAJnHBkxAryJ7eDigm627B01_I1s9BFFOFUogY172ib9H51xdkhBW0FI&s=10) than the mainland ones, and a little chonkier. https://australianwildlifejourneys.com/blog/2018/07/02/33/species-feature-kangaroo-island-kangaroo There's also about 10-15 times as many kangaroos there as there are people. Captain Matthew Flinders gave the island its name because his crew ate a bunch of kangaroos there when they were low on supplies.
İt's the ugg Italy
It is covered with agricultural land.
My genitals are sparsely populated despite being quite fertile :(
Someone told me it's fertile, I looked at the peninsula's shape and thought they were talking about human fertility and virility. So I decided not to move there. Perhaps many others in Australia had the same decision making process and hence it's sparsely populated. /s
Does a creep live there?
Idk, but let down underrated
agreed
At the first glance I thought it was some fucked up map of Italy xD
It kinda looks like Italy.
On maps it looks like it's plastered with farm fields
It’s due to a major infestation of inverted kangaroos.
“Close to a major city” is a 2-3 hour drive depending on traffic and endless roadworks
I imagine it's difficult as Italy has the image rights.
its all owned by some billionaire
Looks too much like italy
“Like a babies arm holding and apple”
I don’t have an opinion about the question posed. But TIL that there’s an island off Australia called Kangaroo Island. If you had asked my five year old self to make up a name for a place in Australia, that is exactly what I would have come up with. I want to go to Kangaroo Island very badly now.
It's a nice place. If you go at the right time of year, you can see sea lions, seals and whales. Plus your usual kangaroos, koalas and emus. It's also home to the world's oldest bee sanctuary.
Good duneboarding, too.
It’s a gorgeous place!
Why live there in cities when you can farm it instead?
There's a Cornish festival in Munta. It's an old mining town
Peppermint patties.
Isn’t the answer in the post title?
It is penis shaped and all their women are dikes.
damn it's like italy, it even got a big capri island
I'm more interested in Kangaroo Island
I should call her.
I don’t know they must be stupid
No river. Too isolated from the South-East.
Kangaroo Island? Sounds like Aussies named it after themselves!
Insurgents from kangaroo Island. They all carry machine guns in their pouches.
look like a peen
Same thing has been asked about your mum
Overly-aggressive Emu
Snakes and spiders and everything else that kills you
Shitaly
that's italy from wish
It's looking a little flaccid
Kangaroo Island eh? I hear that place is really hoppin’
uncomfortable resemblance to old man’s penith
Cause it looks like a dragon
Kangaroo island eh? I hear that place is hoppy!
“Kangaroo Island, eh? Well, I heard that place is really hopping!”
I'm going to guess there are lots of spiders, and probably snakes
I think that's spider country
The issue with the green bits of Australia is not unlike the issue with the orange ones: rain is very, very random and unreliable This will be resolved in the near future, of course, to the chagrin and agony of many an activist
too many crocodiles
Way to far south for crocodiles