Here are some geographical quirks of Australia that you might not already know.
These are the Australian states and territories.
Here’s Tasmania, the only island state - ringed by ocean and cut off from the rest of the
continent by the Bass Strait - except it’s not quite.
If we zoom in we can see that Tasmania and its northern neighbour state Victoria actually
share a land border on this tiny and uninhabited island.
The maritime border between the two states cuts right across Boundary Islet.
This little islet-border anomaly arose as the result of surveying errors, and misinterpretations
when repeatedly carving off sections of the colony of New South Wales into what are today
Tasmania and Victoria.
Boundary Islet is basically a chunk of rock, that sometimes has some seals lounging on
it.
Speaking of disjointed borders, the Australian Capital Territory (or ACT) was carved out
of New South Wales so the federal government could have a territory of its own from which
to govern.
But they felt strongly about the federal government also having access to a seaport - so instead
of making the ACT somewhere on the coast, they just annexed another small territory,
the southern peninsula of Jervis Bay.
Jervis Bay is a seperate territory from the ACT, but when it comes to federal elections,
the people of Jervis Bay vote in the electorate of Fenner, which is centred in the ACT.
And in terms of geographical quirks of electorates, spare a thought for the people of Norfolk
Island who vote in the ACT electorate of Bean, 1900km away.
But that isn’t even the furthest removed local representation in the country.
The electorate of Lingiari encompasses the red centre of Australia, the tropical Top
End of the Northern Territory (minus the urban areas of Darwin and some of Palmerston) - and
Christmas Island, which is two and a half thousand kilometres away.
And there are some even more widely-distributed pockets of Lingiari, maybe it needs a video
of its own.
While we’re on the topic of the outback, Australia is home to some REALLY large pieces
of land that are used for cattle stations.
The largest is Anna Creek Station, which is the largest cattle station in the world.
It’s over 23,000 km squared, which is a larger land area than 50 of the world’s
countries.
And it’s also true that the country of Brunei used to own a station in Australia that had
a larger land area than Brunei itself - although it sold the station in 2018.
Back to the state borders now - and while Australian Aboriginal people have of course
been living on the land with their own boundaries for tens of thousands of years - when white
colonists tried to divide it up, the results were… imperfect.
Here’s the border of Victoria, New South Wales and South Australia.
Looks like it should be a pretty neat line right?
If we zoom in, we can see the borders are actually a bit of a mess.
Victoria juts out to the north-west.
The river boundary moves from being along the southern bank, to being in the middle.
The MacCabe corner is the south-western-most point of NSW, and the intersection of the
3 states is in the middle of the river.
So, why isn’t this just a nice line?
The 141st meridian was originally surveyed to be the eastern border of South Australia.
However, was incorrectly placed about 3 and a half kilometres west of where it actually
lies.
When the mistake was discovered, NSW decided it was fair enough, and established the accurate
141st meridian as the border.
Victoria kinda went… “yeaaahhhnahhh we like the border where it is”, leaving us
with this mess today.
And Australia has another line that looks straight but is actually not - the borders
of the Northern Territory, South Australia, and Western Australia.
This north-south line cutting across the entire continent looks dead straight, but if we zoom
in we can again see, there is a tiny perturbation.
This deviation is only 127 meters long, and was of course the result of another surveying
error 100 years ago.
The border was intended to be approximately on the 129th meridian.
So instead of measuring from one end of the continent to the other, 2 points were picked
at either end that were pretty close to the meridian, and a north-south line was drawn
from each point.
Except, of course, the points were not exactly on the meridian, so the north-south lines
didn’t match up.
Instead of fixing it, they just drew an east-west line to join the two north-south lines up.
Could they have fixed it?
For sure, but they had actually already agreed not to worry too much about little slip-ups
like this.
They had agreed that “an academic result was not to be sought after, with a high and
fanciful degree of accuracy”.
A century-old way of saying, she’ll be right.
And, just a couple for my fellow Victorians who, like me, thought they had a good mental
map of Australia in their head, but maybe I don’t - Adelaide is north of Canberra,
and Perth is north of Sydney.
These realisations actually blew my mind.
Well that’s it!
I hope there was something for everyone in this video, surprise island land borders,
silly electoral boundaries, surveying mistakes, and surprisingly northerly cities.
See you next time.