Image source: I figured googling “tropical hell” would produce something neat, and as you can see it totally did - but turns out it’s also a game. It just wouldn’t be cricket if I nicked their image without attribution, so do check them out: https://www.coregames.com/games/1ef78a/tropical-he...
If the northern coast of Australia is so tropical, why don't more people live there? How can we attract them?
Let me put it this way:
I live in Wellington, New Zealand. It’s the windiest city in the world. Seriously. Google it.
There’s something about NZ geography that amplifies incoming frigid Antarctic gales into an icy liquid-nitrogen blowtorch, right into the harbour. A July southerly will knock you off your feet.
And it’s humid! Cold AND humid! A horrid sodden drizzly hurricane. The humidity imparts unto the gales this extra Grond-esque heft. It's awful. It pierces even the thickest coat.
As a kid, for years, I therefore yearned to live somewhere tropical, and THEREFORE delightful. Somewhere with roasting balmy beaches, swimming, pineapple wedges in drinks, coconut bras, and nocturnal partying. The good stuff.
These things are undeniably awesome! But actual real residence in tropical conditions unearths just a few drawbacks. A few years ago I spent a month in São Paulo, Brazil. It’s bloody hot! 35C+ heat every day. Holy shit. I melted. You could scrape me off the pavement.
And it’s not just oh-what-a-delightful-change-from-freezing-winter-gales hot. Genuinely distressingly hot. I could barely even think straight, let alone perform anything quickly. For years I’d wondered why so many hotter countries had various national stereotypes involving laziness. Oh good god. Now I know why. You literally can’t do things quickly. At least during the day. You’ll burn. You'll melt. You'll collapse.
The invention of air conditioning, I hear, literally transformed just about every hot bit in the world. Most Americans I’ve talked to say the southern USA was in many ways a mosquito-ridden backwater … until the 1960s, when aircon proliferated. Now, 27 billion pensioners have moved to Florida to cherry-pick the Good Bits of the Sunshine State’s undeniably phenomenal weather.
Do the same in Australia’s northern bits? Now that we’ve got air conditioning? I’d be up for that. But only if we can swaddle the Northern Territories with so much air conditioning that forms a ginormous tropical ice cap like a snazzy Antarctica.
So yeah. Let's do that. I’m a natural ginger. Shove me outside in 40C+ heat and I’ll explode like Nazis proximal to Arks.