Taming the frontier

摘要

Australians have long viewed the north of their country the way America once regarded its West: as the last frontier. The region of red deserts and steamy coasts above the Tropic of Capricorn sprawls across the states of Queensland and Western Australia and the Northern Territory (NT), a federal domain (see map). It is the size of India, yet its population is tiny. Barely more than 1m of Australia's 23m people live there. But the north is changing. Once a haven for misfits and fortune-seekers, it is now attracting people at a faster rate than the rest of Australia, thanks largely to a boom resulting from the sale of its iron ore, coal and gas to Asia's resource-hungry economies. Tony Abbott, Australia's conservative prime minister, goes so far as to call the region an emerging "economic powerhouse".