backblock

• back-block

From back +‎ block.

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backblock (plural backblocks)

1. (Australia, New Zealand, usually in the plural) A remote tract of land in the interior; hence (in plural) sparsely populated country far from major cities and lacking conveniences common in urban areas. [from 19th c.]
   • 1931, New Zealand House of Representatives, Parliamentary Debates‎, volume 229, page 281:

     I speak solely for the backblock roads, and I contend that the time has arrived when the Government should turn its attention to the metalling of these roads.

   • 1955, Helen Wilson, My First Eighty Years‎, page 185:

     It has happened in other districts that new settlement has turned the old centres into isolated backblocks.

   • 1991, Robin Hyde, Gillian Boddy, Jacqueline D. Matthews, Disputed Ground: Robin Hyde, Journalist, page 225:

     Backblocks hardship is a very real thing, but Mary Scott expresses it somewhat too much in the Victorian ‘There′s a tear on your eye’ mode, little graves on the hillside and old servants, horses and dogs, faithful to the last.

   • 2001, Richard Flanagan, Gould's Book of Fish, Vintage, published 2016, page 82:

     The weeping man was an emancipist who had a backblock in the next valley & sometimes came over to see his cobber the shepherd, both being Roscommon men.

2. Land behind that which fronts on water; land without a permanent watercourse. [from 19th c.]