Splitting Australia...

I've seen some timelines where Australia has been split as many as 4 or 5 ways by various European (and in a few places Asian) powers.

I have no problem with a split that gives more or less the State of Western Australia to one power and the rest of Australia to another, but I've also seen some that have one power with Western Australia *minus* the area within 200 miles of OTL Perth, even though that area (while four times the size of France) is only capable of supporting about 50 people.

So what reasonable and unreasonable splits of Australia have people seen?
 

SunDeep

Banned
I've seen some timelines where Australia has been split as many as 4 or 5 ways by various European (and in a few places Asian) powers.

I have no problem with a split that gives more or less the State of Western Australia to one power and the rest of Australia to another, but I've also seen some that have one power with Western Australia *minus* the area within 200 miles of OTL Perth, even though that area (while four times the size of France) is only capable of supporting about 50 people.

So what reasonable and unreasonable splits of Australia have people seen?

Only capable of supporting about 50 people? So how does it support a population of 200,000 people IOTL? And the Kimberley region in particular, in the extreme north of Western Australia, has the capability to support a far larger population than it currently does. Based on its climate, its soil quality, the amount of rainfall that it recieves and the mineral resources in the region, the Kimberley is at least as habitable as the state of Rajasthan in India, or Sindh Province in Pakistan- possibly even more so. And what are the current populations of Rajasthan and Sindh? 68.6M and 42.2M respectively. No; carrying capacity isn't an issue, not by a long way.
 
Only capable of supporting about 50 people? So how does it support a population of 200,000 people IOTL? And the Kimberley region in particular, in the extreme north of Western Australia, has the capability to support a far larger population than it currently does. Based on its climate, its soil quality, the amount of rainfall that it recieves and the mineral resources in the region, the Kimberley is at least as habitable as the state of Rajasthan in India, or Sindh Province in Pakistan- possibly even more so. And what are the current populations of Rajasthan and Sindh? 68.6M and 42.2M respectively. No; carrying capacity isn't an issue, not by a long way.

*cough* *cough*
 
I've seen a number of people try to get China or Japan to settle in Australia. Those usually end up with people on this site pointing out that powers like China didn't have a reason to go there and even less of a reason to stay.
 
I had a TL where Australia was split between Texas, Cuba, Mexico, the Philippines, Canada, and the US. Argentina got New Zealand.
 

Which have absolutely nothing to do with how well the area can or can't support a population of a certain size, but everything about those suggested to get moved there being Jews, which would later migrate to the big cities.

given what is being tried to argue (or at least, what i believe you're trying to argue), the link doesn't support it in any shape or form
 
An interesting split would be a surviving independent Aboriginal state or even trekker equivalent states established in say the OTL Northern Territories perhaps around Alice Springs. Without a dominant European power in complete control of the continent it would be possible to play off each other and maintain the less valuable bits.
 

SunDeep

Banned
I'd say that the Kimberley region is the most likely place for someone else to carve out territory on the Australian mainland, and I've got a specific POD in mind. IOTL, in 1851, in order to generate fund for his cash-strapped administration, the new governor of Portuguese Timor, Lima Lopes, went back his nation's back and sold the islands which now constitute the Indonesian province of East Nusa Tenggaru to the Dutch under the table, in return for a pretty meagre payment of 200,000 Florins. If someone else was prepared to make a better offer though, Lopes would have been prepared to sell East Nusa Tenggaru out to virtually anyone; and from there, the distance to get to the Australian coast would be similar to the distance between Sicily and Libya- negligible, when it comes to establishing colonial settlements. And IOTL, the Kimberley was the last region of Australia that the British staked their claim to, only doing so in 1879. For those 28 years, whichever colonial nation purchases East Nusa Tenggaru has free rein to set up colonial settlements id North-Western Australia from there.

IOTL, the Dutch were too busy bringing the last few independent kingdoms in the Dutch East Indies under their control to bother with it. If someone else takes it though, someone without existing commitments or ongoing conflicts in the region- say, the Austrians/Austro-Hungarians, the Danes, the Sardinians/Italians, or the Prussians/Germans- they'd be more than capable of establishing colonial settlements in the Kimberley region before the British got there. Of course, whether they can actually hold onto it once the British do get there is another matter entirely, but that would be a topic for the next stage of this TL...
 
Which have absolutely nothing to do with how well the area can or can't support a population of a certain size, but everything about those suggested to get moved there being Jews, which would later migrate to the big cities.

given what is being tried to argue (or at least, what i believe you're trying to argue), the link doesn't support it in any shape or form

It doesn't - but it does suggest a method to get a large number of non-Australians to the region. And while you assert that the Jews would later move to the big cities (and indeed that fear is why the proposed plan was not passed despite having surprisingly large support among the Australian public - 47% of Australians opposed the idea, which means that over half were either for it or at least not against it), the intended plan was always to have the Jews remain in the region.

Now, the Australian government was also not pleased about the idea of en bloc settlement of aliens on Australian soil, making a non-Australian state on the continent...but perhaps with some slightly more successful campaigning, and/or some pressure from London, we might see the settlement of a few hundred thousand Jews in Australia, eventually forming a semiautonomous Quebec-style region, which will see immense illegal immigration after the war, and which might some decades after the war eventually secede.

Hell, such a state need not necessarily even be completely self-reliant in terms of food (though I will note that similar monsoon-type climates support immense population densities elsewhere and that Zionists never shied from massive use of chemical fertilizers and innovative agricultural techniques) - the abundance of diamonds, metals, and fossil fuels would be enough to sustain the early-to-mid-term settlement, and there's every reason to expect that a more advanced manufacturing and service based economy would replace it after the first generation.
 
It doesn't - but it does suggest a method to get a large number of non-Australians to the region. And while you assert that the Jews would later move to the big cities (and indeed that fear is why the proposed plan was not passed despite having surprisingly large support among the Australian public - 47% of Australians opposed the idea, which means that over half were either for it or at least not against it), the intended plan was always to have the Jews remain in the region.

Hold on a second ... don't go putting words in my mouth. I didn't say that Jews would move to bigger cities later, i said that the concern was that Jews would move to bigger cities ... small but important difference.

That said, it wasn't even my point, my point is that the area can support a population if it gets one (and don't give them overwhelming reasons not to be there)
 
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