There you go peuce, it's not laughable at all.
I regularly fly between Griffith and Gladstone, some 600 nm and except for CTAF I rarely speak to anybody, simply because there is nobody to talk to.
Just prior to Mildura with T28D, the only traffic we heard on the area frequency was some ultralights calling downwind, base and final at Naranderra, (some 200nm away), and some RPT in the flight levels.