Well the discussion did start off talking about someone in modern Australia.
>And that's what doesn't make sense. Surely the distance
>you want to be from your neighbour is such that you both have
>as much land as you can farm - and no more. Two hours walk, maybe,
>but that's closer to 15km than 150. Rural Britain has villages
>every 2-3 miles, because pre-car, that was the distance that made
>sense. So why, given similar means of transport, did the pioneering
>Americans want to isolate themselves?
That's 2-3 miles in areas of good agricultural land with a good water supply for each village. With that you can use most of the land for crops. In the US and more so in Australia you've got long distances between places where that combination exists and while cattle and sheep can use some of that land there are stretches which just aren't viable for agriculture.
Think about how they travelled - heading west with only a guide who claimed to know roughly where some decent land was. I bet half the time they reached a place and then found the soil wasn't suitable for the seeds they'd brought so they had to move on. Or someone had got there before them and all that was left was the marginal land which required a lot of work to irrigate and fertilise. Worse still was settling somewhere and then finding their agricultural techniques exhaused the land so they were forced to move on again.
The dense pattern of settlements in Europe represent a farming economy growing to the maximum the land will support. North America and Australia never reached those levels of population before mechanisation allowed a small agricultural population to feed large cities.
-- Donald Oddy http://www.grove.demon.co.uk/
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