The Most Isolated City in the World

Defined: A city of at least 1 million people, furthest away from another city of at least 1 million people.

Perth, Western Australia, is the most isolated city in the world. It’s next closest city, Adelaide, is 2,100km away. To give that perspective, imagine the area from Ottawa, Ont to Orlando, Fla (an area containing just under 100 million people) containing nothing but bush and desert. It is closer to Jakarta than it is to Sydney. I have plenty of other stats, but I think you get it, Perth is far, far from everyone else.

As such, it certainly doesn’t seem as if the city is making any attempt to integrate with the rest of the country. Western Australia refuses to follow daylight savings rules, and as a result is 2.5 hours behind states that border it. All broadcasts are delayed three hours, this includes live events such as sports, news, and even emergency alert messages. Seriously. As tidal waves were approaching the eastern shore of Australia, they were reporting it to hit in approximately half an hour’s time, when in actual fact the tidal waves, which never quite materialized, had hit the shores 2.5 hours earlier. Sure, it didn’t directly affect Westralians but it would have been nice to know that everyone was ok, in real time, not when it seemed convenient to broadcast. Which is really quite odd, because there’s value in a news channel being “the first to…”. Seeing as how the information was available, someone should have taken advantage of it, I suppose that just goes to show how ignored WA really is.

Being the most isolated and probably most ignored city in the world, Westralians will grab onto anything to take pride in. For example, being the last city to celebrate Australia Day, whoo hoo. When the party’s already 3-4 hours old, and everyone’s long gone to sleep (as complained in previous article) Perth gets to pretend it has the country’s attention. Westralians also like to refer to Perth as “The City of Light” (which, to everyone else in the world of course refers to Paris) because residents turned their lights on, as astronaut John Glenn orbited overhead who, at that time, did acknowledge he could see the city (Well duh, refer to article title).

I don’t mean to knock on Perth so much, I’ve enjoyed my time here, it’s climate is truly unbelievable. 30+ everyday and sunny, something that’s really easy to take for granted. The beaches have nothing but fine white sand and warm green water. The sun sets over the Indian Ocean everyday, I can certainly see what has attracted 1.6 million people to the city.

Now, that’s an article I had written some time ago. I’m not quite sure where I was going with it at the end so I’ll just leave it because talking about how isolated Perth is, just seems ridiculous now that I’m in Norseman.