Going back to Thomas Moore's Utopia, I realized the effort the founder of Utopia put into making it an island. It seems we like the idea of a complete and perfected realm. If a territory is too complicated, if we can't see the borders and boundaries of it, then we somehow give up and think 'this will never be perfectable.' There's something about the smallness and completeness of an island. And it has to be reasonably small. Australia is an island, but it isn't utopia.