The Outback is empty. Big red desert, nothing in it, no people, no towns, the dead heart of Australia. Drive west of the divide and there is essentially nothing for two thousand kilometres. Maybe a roadhouse every couple of hours. Maybe a station. Mostly just spinifex and sky. We say things like 'a country the size of Western Europe with the population of Adelaide' and we mean the bit past Bourke.
Aboriginal people have continuously occupied the so-called Outback for at least 60,000 years, the longest continuous human occupation of any landscape on Earth. The current population of remote Australia is around 500,000 people, including more than 1,200 Aboriginal communities, dozens of towns of 1,000 to 10,000 people (Alice Springs, Mount Isa, Broken Hill, Roxby Downs, Karratha, Kalgoorlie), and a mining economy worth over $250 billion a year. The Pilbara alone produces about 38 percent of the world's iron ore. Cattle stations the size of Belgium employ entire communities. The 'empty' framing is a colonial legal fiction (terra nullius, formally rejected by the High Court in 1992) and a tourism trope. The Outback is sparse. It is not empty. It has people, language, economy, music, sport, politics, and very specific arguments about which roadhouse has the worst coffee.