There's massive amounts of community support in rural Australia .. and occasional opportunistic teabags (thieves), we all wave and coordinate on fire fighting and harvests, keep an eye out for carpet baggers, and rescue outsiders that keep getting lost / stranded.

> someone would see you trying to make off with a giant bale

If you ever get into high luxury car theft, in London one crew pattern was to all wear high vis jackets, someone has a clip board, and the team lifts a high end car straight into a Faraday cage lined truck in plain and open sight.

If the alarm goes off and people look, someone on the crew just visibly shrugs and mimes putting their hands over their ears and gets back to knicking a car.

Point being, successful thieves often look like they're supposed to be doing what they're doing and they don't register .. unless someone specifically knows that hay bale and the owner of that land .. but that's an aside.

> the extreme sort of isolation that I believe is possible in Australia.

The vast majority of people in Australia live near the coast and to each other, it's quite bunched up.

My state is 3x the size of Texas, has a bit over 2 million in population now, but they mostly all live in and around Perth, the Capital city (and famously described by one US astronaut as the most isolated city on the planet) - I'm from quite some distance from that City in a region with considerably less people.

Still, I got to travel the planet doing geophysics and related things.