OK. I can’t take Dani to Darwin in the Northern Territory because all the states seem to be hiding behind the sofa. Not to be put off I started looking into places in New South Wales (NSW). We all know Australia is massive but I somehow had this image of NSW being just a small corner of the country. Bottom right hand corner to be exact. Well it is; but it’s still bloody big!
The Scale is Incredible
Consider how big NSW is compared to the countries we know best. Great Britain and Spain. First of all I just found the surface area sizes for the different countries and NSW. But then I found this great website which not only gives you details on sizes of different areas but also a visual comparison with overlaying maps. Not only countries but continents, states, other areas such as Amazon rainforest, Sahara desert. All sorts of places.
Here’s the data…
Spain has an area of 505,992 km². Great Britain covers an area of 209,331 km².
So, Spain and GB combine to cover an area of 715,323 km².
NSW covers 800,640 km² so is bigger than Spain and GB combined.
In fact if you add on the area of the island of Ireland (that’s north and south) – which covers an area of 84,421 km² – then the total for Spain, GB and Ireland is 799,744 km². So still (just) less than the area of NSW.
That still leaves an extra 896 km² advantage for NSW. If we can’t find a place to have some great adventures in this state there is not much hope is there? And we haven’t done too bad so far have we? I just need to break the news to the boy and convince him that all is not lost. That will be the difficult part.
MapFight – great website for playing around
Check out the website here: https://mapfight.appspot.com/
It’s actually quite good fun. Dropping a small country into a “mapfight” with Australia. Otr comparing any country with another. You can also do country comparisons to continents. So for example, the famous one is Australia vs Europe. That’s one you often see on posters and postcards.
Here is the one from MapFight: In the case of ‘Europe’ there are a few options available such as ‘Western Europe’ and Europe including part of Russia. This one is Europe made up of the European Union countries (as of 2017 hence the UK is there).
And one last one… When they mention things like forest destruction on the news they always say thigns like “an area the size of Wales is destroyed every day”. Well here’s the whole of (old) Wales vs New South Wales . It looks lost in the size of just one state.
