Here’s a fact that sounds fake. Mainland Australia, coast to coast, is about 4,000 km across. The Moon’s diameter is 3,475 km. Australia is wider than the Moon.
The Moon is a sphere and Australia is a sticker on one, so it’s not a fair fight in every direction. But as pub geometry goes it holds up, and it tells you something the map never bothered to. Australia is enormous.
Australia: 7,706,123 km². Nearly the size of the contiguous United States. Almost twice the entire European Union. It’s the sixth largest country on Earth and the only one that gets a whole continent to itself.
So why does it look modest?
Because it sits between roughly 10 and 44 degrees south, close enough to the equator that the Mercator projection hands it no free inflation. Meanwhile the giants of the map’s upper floors, Russia, Canada, Greenland, are all being quietly doubled and tripled. Australia is drawn honestly in a room full of countries wearing costumes. Honesty, on this map, looks like shrinkage.
A few more facts for the pocket:
- About 87 per cent of Australians live within 50 km of the coast. The middle is nearly empty, and more than a third of the country is desert.
- Its cattle stations are sized like nations. Anna Creek Station is bigger than Israel.
- The Great Barrier Reef alone stretches about 2,300 km, roughly London to Moscow.
The costume fitting
Want to see what Mercator would have done for Australia given the chance? Open this scene. Australia has been dragged up to 58 degrees north, parked on top of western Russia, and it is suddenly a monster. Same country, same 7.7 million km², drawn about three and a half times too big purely because of where it’s standing.
Drag it home and watch it deflate on the way south. Nothing about Australia changes. Only the flattery does.
The map never lied about Australia’s size. It lied about everyone else’s, and let Australia take the reputational hit.