What if Hobart was Australia’s greatest city?

In this alternate world, the Australian and South Asian plates would have collided long ago, with our plucky Tassie smashing into the Spice Islands and creating a land bridge, writes Bernard Salt. Picture: Getty Images

It has always struck me as ironic that Australia’s sparsely populated northwest and Indonesia’s densely populated islands, including Bali and Java, are located so close to each other, and yet they offer vastly different ecological environments.

The reason, of course, is that both places sit on different tectonic (geological) plates.

The Indonesian archipelago offers rich volcanic soils that support an abundance of flora, fauna and human settlement. Australia also has rich volcanic soils – but they are on the opposite side of the continent.

Which leads me to conclude that the story of Australia could have been very different if our continent was rotated 180 degrees so that our southeast coast swapped spots with our northwest coast.

It’s not an entirely impossible concept. What if 30 million years ago, when the Australian land mass splintered from Antarctica, one of our breakaway partners from the Gondwana supercontinent had given us a bit of a nudge? And what if this had sent our adrift continent and its plate rotating in a clockwise direction?

The fertile eastern seaboard with Cape York pointing north to 12 o’clock would have rotated over millions of years to face 3 o’clock in the east before pointing south to 6 o’clock today.

In this alternate world, the Australian and South Asian plates would have collided long ago, with our plucky Tassie smashing into the Spice Islands and creating a land bridge, or an island chain, that would enable the intermingling of flora, fauna and humanity between the land masses.

This rotation would align and fuse the volcanic soils of both the Australian and the South Asian plates. Great cities would emerge in this part of Australia. Hobart would usurp the scale and function of Sydney and Canberra.

Fast-forward to colonial times and the Dutch, the Portuguese, the Spanish and no doubt others would have found their way to the islands and pathways connecting Australia with the islands of the Indonesian archipelago. In this “what if” world, the west coast is our continent’s most verdant.

Consider this alternative history that follows. The Dutch ship Batavia founders in 1629 not on the Abrolhos Islands (off today’s Geraldton) but directly onto the mainland near a new west-coast version of Coffs Harbour. The survivors trek north, and on reaching Java they speak of vast rivers flowing east to the horizon from a Great (Western) Dividing Range.

In due course the French and the English arrive on the east coast and on the west coast. The Australian continent is subdivided in the African style by colonial powers carving out territories that follow the riches of the rivers.

There are gas fields off a southeast shelf. Coal is still exported from a Bowen Basin that is now positioned in the west. Iron ore is still exported but via east coast ports with rail lines extending inland to a Paraburdoo community somewhere in the vicinity of today’s Riverina.

We are still the same continent but our flora, fauna and our peopling is shown to be inextricably shaped by geological forces that were set in train millions of years ago.

“What if Australia rotated?” is one of my favourite idle musings.