You're right that comparing population centres is more helpful, but London has a total population around half that of the whole of Australia with density over 4500/km^2. Even if you expand to the whole of south east England, there's a population density of 450/km^2

Central Sydney residential density is over 9000/km^2 and greater Sydney over 1100/km^2.

It's very true that London is more dense but Sydney is a reasonable city to compare to dense urban areas anywhere in the world.

While counterintuitive, Australia is more urbanised than the UK.

60% of Australians live in 1M+ cities, while only 27% of Brits do. That's 15M dwelling in big Australians cities. Only 17.65M in the UK.

https://ourworldindata.org/urbanization

We have a _lot_ of empty space here.

Our biggest cattle station (think "cow farm" for non-Aussies) is almost 10% of the land area of the UK. We have ~20 cattle stations larger than 10,000 square kilometers. You'd only need to aggregate the top 15-17 biggest farms to get the same amount of land area as the entire United Kingdom. (Admittedly, far far less productive land, most of which probably qualifies as desert, but still...)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_stations_i...

I think everyone understands that.

The point here is the opposite: that the east coast is reasonably dense and useful for comparison purposes.

Central Australia has pretty much the density of the North Atlantic...

I (probably badly) was pointing out that vast chunks of Australia, to maybe 4 or 5 decimal places of precision, have zero people per square kilometer. We only have 25-ish million people, but fully half of them live in just three cities, Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane.

The map here strongly proves your point: https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/australia-popula...

And mine too - look how much of the country is devoid of towns with at least 10,000 people in them... I just slurped that table into a spreadsheet, there are 24,860,107 people represented in a coloured dots in that map. From that site's total population of 25,463,119, that leave 603,012 people spread across that vast unmarked unmarked grey interior...

I live in Adelaide. It's over 700km to the nearest city above 250K people (Geelong).

Perth of course is the most isolated major city (1M+) on earth - over 2600km from the next 1M+ cities (Adelaide and Bali).

Indeed, and most of those live on the east coast between Melbourne and Brisbane.