"Land for sale, bigger than Austria". These days even the magazine DIE WELT was worth a headline (DIE WELT ONLINE 26.06.2015). An Australian family offers land with a total area of over 100,000 square kilometers for sale. And the 160 000 cattle are on top of it. Special equipment included in the price so to speak. In a area like Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg together geographically, it is not always easy to be a cowboy.
Australia - what a land in which plots of this immense size go over the counter of the estate agent, while in Germany years of neighborhood processes take place over whether the landmark must be 10 cm more engraved on one side or the other. Unimaginable dimensions.
Maybe a few numbers will help your imagination.
Australia (derived from the Latin "Terra australis", which means "southern country“) has an area of more than 7 million km² and is thus 21 times the size of the Federal Republic of Germany and is at the same time the largest island and the smallest continent of the world.
If you want to manage the 3700 km from Darwin in the far north to Melbourne in the south by car, you should estimate over 40 hours driving time. But there is an attractive and historically valuable alternative for railroad enthusiasts - The Ghan. The transcontinental train, one of the longest in the world, traverses four climates and 22.5 degrees of latitude before arriving in Adelaide on the south coast after more than 2 days and nights.
Or from west to east? It is about 4900 km across the continent. On foot, the walk takes about 41 days. However, without interruption and without sleep. But maybe after 2000 km you can put your feet up for a few minutes at Ayers Rock (Uluru in the language of the Aborigines).
Also one should be out of your mind on this tour - the hope to meet many interlocutors on the way.
Although Australia is the sixth largest country in the world, it has just about 23 million inhabitants, about as many as Romania. 2.9 Australians lose themselves on one square kilometer (in Germany there are 229 Germans per square kilometer). No wonder that in Down Under, therefore, it is more common to find out how many square kilometers of land are per inhabitant.
And even this whole statistic is - as you know from statistics secretly anyway - more than polished. With 85 percent of all Australians living within 50 kilometers of the continent's coastline, one can vividly imagine what the country's outback looks like - empty and largely unpopulated.
No, not completely empty as a few last figures on "colonization" show.
More than 150 million sheep live in Australia. That's about 6 to 7 times more than the human population.
And then there are still 1.2 million mostly wild camels, the largest camel herd in the world. And 200 million rabbits, against whose spread even a 3300-kilometer fence across the country could not really effect much.
The Outback Wanderer can meet all these animals, but not humans.
So it is not surprising that it was an Australian who invented the word "selfie" back in 2002, this kind of self-portrait with a mobile phone that does not need a second person as a photographer.