Australia has not experienced a recession in four decades. The economy has grown every year since 1990. Consider the chaos we in the West have experienced economically, financially, industrially and politically in those years. Down here, an entire continent has sailed through various global crises. It’s very remoteness may have contributed to this economic serenity, but its sheer size has also helped.
It has a land mass larger than the United States, with the population of the Netherlands and Belgium combined, and 90 per cent of its inhabitants live in 2 per cent of the available land. It is vast, empty and very old – about 60 million years old. For most of this time it was devoid of humans, so when the world’s most successful predator finally arrived, they had less time to damage existing animals and plants.
The indigenous population were maritime invaders who arrived on boats from Indonesia, possibly 60,000 years ago; the second seafaring conquerors, the British, rocked up in 1770. Europeans have only been in Australia for about 0.3 per cent of the total time it has been occupied by humans or, to put it another way, for 99.7 per cent o
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