“17 million people, on that very small piece of Earth”. A Dutch song everybody should know. The song explains the Netherlands very well, but for this subject we'll stick to this bit of lyric. To be precise: The Netherlands counts 17,112,595 persons on the 14th of May 2017 at 7:47 PM. And for Australia at that time the number stands on 24,598,187, which is 1.4 times the inhabitants of the Netherlands. Now, let’s look at the area. Australia has an area of 7,692,024 km2, while the Netherlands  only has 41,543 km2. That is no less than 185 times smaller! 

Because Australia hasn't got a big amount of people living there, relatively speaking, places can be quite far away from each other. My pen pal has to travel almost half an hour by train to get to school, even though he lives in Melbourne, which has about 4.3 million inhabitants. Amsterdam “only” has 0.8 million inhabitants.

By Jasmijn Baldee