The first town on the list is a place famous for building houses underground due to the heat on the surface being too extreme. It’s also in the middle of nowhere.

The rest are country towns, not suburban ones. Where you need to drive hours to get to anything approaching what you might think of as “downtown”, and even then there’s not gonna be a lot there.

The reality in Australia is that the vast majority of the population lives within 100km of the east coast. It’s not like America where there are literally thousands of decent-sized small towns (tens of thousands of people), there just isn’t enough population for that. Almost half the population lives in two cities (Melbourne and Sydney) and neither of these are affordable places no matter how far out into the suburbs you go.

Good luck painting houses and mowing lawns in Coober Pedy haha

If you work remotely (but don’t need a great internet connection to do so), don’t mind having absolutely minimal amenities, cultural activities (apart from a few tourist traps), international airports etc. within a day or two’s drive… then sure.

Usually these places are cheap because there is little economy (so few jobs), so most of the even slightly ambitious youth escape to the cities or larger towns in the area, which leaves them with ‘interesting’ demographics.

This is an interesting inversion actually, because things like meth and then the associated crime are much more of a problem in the country than the cities here, which is kind of the opposite of what you hear about the cities being dangerous in places like the US.

Here's a write up of number #4: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-12-18/tara-isolated-rural-b.... There's a reason for that pricing.

#3 Port Pirie is (in)famous for its lead contamination [1].

#5 Queenstown is also contaminated [2]

The rest could be nice?

[1] https://theconversation.com/lead-poisoning-of-port-pirie-chi...

[2] https://www.anu.edu.au/news/all-news/tasmanian-lakes-metal-c...

# 9 Charleville - I've not lived there, but I've visited. For a sense of the remoteness, when the International Space Station passes overhead, it's twice as close as the nearest major city.

Sounds like astronomy heaven.

Tara, QLD, is where people who want to be forgotten go to disappear. There are off grid shanty towns in the area, one of which was the site of a fatal ambushing of police officers last year.

https://inqld.com.au/insights/2022/12/14/police-shooting-tra...

There's a reason these places are cheap.