World Building, A Land Down Under

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So, I was intending to worldbuild a little for a region in a Fallout pnp game I was intending to do at some point (and mostly out my own personal interest and boredom). However, this region is in Australia. Around Ballarat and far West on the border of Victoria and South Australia, and South on the coast and the outskirts of an irradiated and largely unpopulated Melbourne.

How much is known about the world outside of America in Fallout's prehistory (I.E before bombs)?
I figure next to nothing is known about Australia so I've got a lot of artistic license here. A few of my main questions are simply the below list, but anything else that might help would be appreciated.
  • Did the USA ever sell or contract much of its military hardware to its allies (in the same sense as Australia operating M1 Abrams tanks, perhaps the ADF would operate limited numbers of power armour?)
  • Would it have made sense for an Australian corporation to try and do something in the same vein as the Vault program?
  • Did Australia ever stop governing Papua New Guinea? (We still controlled it until 1975)
  • Does Australia remain a nation in the Commonwealth Realms? Does it ever secede from the British monarchy and form a republic?
  • Does the Commonwealth even still exist in the first place? I'm kinda guessing it doesn't if the US is just allowed to annex Canada, unless certain multinational entities that Canada might have been a member of was a factor that was just kind of overlooked.
  • What was New Zealand doing?
  • What was Indonesia doing? (Could the East Timor war still have been a thing? Could Indonesia have been Australia's China in this case? Possibly our role in the unrest before the Great War could've just been as an American puppet state fighting with a Chinese puppet state)
 
A post apoc game set in the australian outback... Beside obvious references to Mad Max, I am not familiar with anything from FO setting that can help you, sorry.
 
Not really. There's a lot more to this country than the Northern Territory. Besides this is going to be set in Victoria, Victoria has more bushland/tropical areas and mountains than it does any deserts. Other than the accents there's really not gonna be much to do with Mad Max.

And I was more interested in pre-war things, because they'd help shape the post apocalyptic world in quite a lot of ways.
 
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While at this point little canon can be said about anywhere outside of Canada in terms of canon, I would imagine that Australia is stilla commonwealth and still owns Papua- such an anachranostic state of things sounds fitting.
 
Honestly I'd sort of thought so as well, if Australia's still going to remain an American pseudo-puppet state (in the same sense that every NATO member is), it would make sense for it to maintain a sort of hyper-conservativism that fits with the setting.

The possibility's still there for Papua to be released. possibly as a puppet state, and possibly after a war with Indonesia roughly around the same time as China's attempt to annex Alaska, where Australia would gain (and keep) control over the other half of the island, and possibly much faster than the Anchorage Reclamation.
How a victory is possible, I don't quite know. As far as I can tell, the plan for a war with Indonesia in real life would be to just bomb everything they have into the dirt and simply laugh from our fortifications as their armies die of starvation and heat-stroke trying to invade us by land. It would probably be a similar case here, and we'd just use the initiative leftover to make gains on West Papua by land. If we were to still have possession of East Papua, that'd be a lot of potential recruits (and air bases) especially considering the, rather hypocritical, use of "FREE YOUR HOMELAND!" propaganda that could be applied.

China did have annexed nations, right? Indonesia could be one of them. Hell, that entire war could instead be declared by Australia after the USA invokes ANZUS (if the treaty still exists) after the invasion of Alaska, making Australia's campaign in the islands of Southeast Asia technically part of the same war. This sort of thing wouldn't really be supported by canon though as far as I can tell.

In a purely realpolitik sense, after the stage where victory would've been achieved, we'd more or less have to release PNG as a free country (albeit one we still technically control). There's too many people there, and even in a cartoonishly conservative climate, the sheer amount of extermination necessary to keep that many people down wouldn't really be in our character.
I'm guessing the post-war state of affairs for them would be a country that could be like South Korea or Singapore, but rather than American or British influences upon their society, they'd have more Australian ones. Their independence would mostly be guaranteed by the Australian armed forces, which would keep them close-by, and this closeness could allow for a relationship where they pretty much feed us and give us rubber in exchange for keeping China (or a newly liberated Indonesia) off of their backs.
 
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Considering the US's isolationist policy and cutting of ties with the outside world, and the fact that Britain is busy fighting the Resource Wars, Australia is probably going to go it alone against China. China appears fairly incompetent from the Yangtze campaign and Operation Anchorae, but the former may well be propaganda and the latter was developed by a mad man. Make of that's what you will.

Australia is probably in a decent state to fight the Chinese- ample natural resources. Maybe that's s why the Reds are coming after them. Perhaps towards the end, isolation began to lead to mass famine, and climate change to desertification. This allowed the Chinese to land an invasion force around Darwin. When the War started, the Chinese said "fuck it" and lobbed a few ICBMs down Australia way, to allow the soldiers they'd already landed to continue fighting. What you got is northern Australia is infested with techno-feudalist Commie states that barely make ends meet, with most of southern Australia devolved into tribalism. Some specks of civilization here and there, probably with a minor bunker complex beneath the capital, Alice Springs, Nd maybe an Aboriginal city built up around an old salt mine.

As to Papua New Guinea: honestly,it would make sense in the world of Flloit. Shit was brutal, and it would make perfect sense to carry on old colonial attitudes, especially when the cultures of New Guinea aren't exactly savory to western sensibilities.

also, as to New Zealand; if they cut ties with Australia, they may come pretty well out of it... After the Fallout, due to lack of natural resources they probably turn into Bronze Age sheep herders and farmers.
 
Well I'm not even all that sure China would have reached the stage of actually invading mainland Australia if it's forced to deal with the United States fighting them on the mainland at home at basically the same time. Darwin's got barely anybody living there in real life (especially compared to every other city) and the resources surrounding it are mostly material, the city's pretty much one big military base to bomb Indonesia from. Everything around it is desert.
If the Chinese actually wanted to make us surrender they'd go around the coast and attack Brisbane, Sydney, and Perth.
Otherwise we have such a small population that if we were farming for ourselves and not exporting it to anywhere else, we could probably ride out the kind of siege situation that would arise from them occupying the North. They really wouldn't be able to hold the North at all, they'd be forced to press South, and if they were to nuke us ahead of their advance, it'd pretty much destroy anything they'd have to benefit from by doing that. There's also nothing saying that we wouldn't have nukes to fight back with. If the United Nations is gone and everybody is going to war left and right and not giving a shit about treaties anymore, I'm guessing an Australian nuclear program would probably march ahead full speed.

If their invasion of Australia had occurred before the Sino-American War, they'd be even more screwed in the region when the inevitable counter-attack from Australia comes at the stage of America's invasion of China. They'd be in the exact same position as Japan in WW2 at that stage. It'd basically be New Guinea Campaign II - The Reckoning.

When the Great War comes I can guess that they'd throw nukes at every state capital, which would pretty much annihilate the population since that's where the overwhelming majority of people actually live. In this case I've actually got a hilarious idea where a lot of smaller cities and towns weren't even hit with bombs mostly because the Chinese didn't even realise they were there and most of their ordnance was destined for the USA.
 
It's an import nation right now but that's purely because of mass immigration and the increasing trend of sending all of our farming overseas (or selling our farming land to China)

You can guess for yourself why these factors wouldn't exist in Fallout.
 
But I'm not sure whether or not there IS enough arable land to support a sizable population, especially if supply lines are constantly tied up in New Guniea.
 
Well that's for the people living in Australia itself. For such a huge country, the population isn't very huge. I'm assuming that if they can occupy Darwin they've probably already overrun New Guinea as well. Most of the population in New Guinea would actually be China's problem at that point, at least until it's taken back. The plan in actually defending the country, mostly seems to be to abandon the Northern Territory in a series of mostly offensive retreats that exist to cause as many casualties to the enemy as possible before withdrawing into Queensland and WA and tricking them into occupying an area that they can't attack anything else from.

I'm guessing that before the war the people who lived there would've been sustained mostly the same way they are in real life, which is to say it's a third world country and most of its people subsistence farm. Either that, or large amounts of the jungle would've been bulldozed by the Australian government in an effort to create actual organised argiculture, in which case actually taking that island might hamstring us fairly significantly and also aid the the Chinese, but not enough for them to really support their own population (which is significantly larger than what we have to support) in any meaningful way.

I also have another idea where sometime around the 2030s-2040s, the Australian government unveils a plan to basically "irrigate" the centre of the country, by building four huge wide canals through the Northern Territory from the coast right up to the border of South Australia. They would have completed two of these canals and opened them up to the ocean, and half-completed the third (with the project mostly being halted after that point due to war with China) by the time the Great War had occurred. This wouldn't have had any noticeable effects by the time war with the Chinese had come (other than more rain in the West), but it'd probably make a lot of places on the West coast actually look the complete opposite of what you'd expect, post-war.
 
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If we're going with that whole "50s future" thing, this policy was expanded to allow for Mediterranean and Eastern European immigrants after World War 2 irl because our Liberal Party government wanted to rebuild our population, but I'm guessing in Fallout they would've left it at that. Even in real life where this policy has been abolished, the greatest share of Australia's immigration comes from Britain at between 1/3 or 1/4 on most given years, and after that China and India. Most other immigration is from the rest of Europe, although mostly the Mediterranean. The only thing that'd be significantly different is that there might be less Chinese and Indian people around and that a certain demographic wouldn't be around anymore to shoot up cafes.
 
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