"We've boundless plains to share,"
Advance Australia Fair was written in the late 1800s by a naive British settler who had not yet learned that Australian ecosystems were nothing like those in his British homeland.

Our soils are ancient and impovershed, our rainfall is fundamentally unreliable and we cannot possibly sustain the sorts of populations that such navive British settlers once dreamed of.

In 1968, as Australians were coming to terms with the ecological limitations of Australia, Dorothea Mackellar wrote "My Country".

The love of field and coppice,
Of green and shaded lanes.
Of ordered woods and gardens
Is running in your veins,
Strong love of grey-blue distance
Brown streams and soft dim skies
I know but cannot share it,
My love is otherwise.

I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains.
I love her far horizons,
I love her jewel-sea,
Her beauty and her terror -
The wide brown land for me!

A stark white ring-barked forest
All tragic to the moon,
The sapphire-misted mountains,
The hot gold hush of noon.
Green tangle of the brushes,
Where lithe lianas coil,
And orchids deck the tree-tops
And ferns the warm dark soil.

Core of my heart, my country!
Her pitiless blue sky,
When sick at heart, around us,
We see the cattle die-
But then the grey clouds gather,
And we can bless again
The drumming of an army,
The steady, soaking rain.

Core of my heart, my country!
Land of the Rainbow Gold,
For flood and fire and famine,
She pays us back threefold-
Over the thirsty paddocks,
Watch, after many days,
The filmy veil of greenness
That thickens as we gaze.

An opal-hearted country,
A wilful, lavish land-
All you who have not loved her,
You will not understand-
Though earth holds many splendours,
Wherever I may die,
I know to what brown country
My homing thoughts will fly.

Please note the fundamental shift in the understanding of Australian ecology between ecologically naive Peter McCormick and ecologically savy Dorothea Mackellar.

Now we have new waves of fresh and naive immigrants that have equally naive views of Australia and her 'boundless plains' that believe can accomodate countless new Australians.

You are missing the point. Social institutions should be small scale not monoliths, because if they fail and they are small it is always possible to find the faulty components. If they are monolithic that is impossible. This is why nations with small populations generally outperform countries with large populations.

The population of the top 10 wealthiest nations in the worldare:

1. Luxembourg - 491,000,
2. Norway - 4.8m,
3. Singapore - 4.8m,
4. USA - 306m,
5. Ireland - 4.5m,
6. Switzerland - 7.7m,
7. Austria - 8.3m,
8. Netherlands -16m,
9. Iceland - 319,000, and
10. Sweden - 9.1m#