Who? I rarely fly direct since I love to land in different airports. Let's say that I need to go from Copenhagen, Zurich, Bangkok.
It always shows up in information that if I don't enter in Copenhagen the ticket from Zurich will be deleted. But the return tickets is not cancelled. I'm traveling several times each year the last 12 years. Now I'm travelling with Lufthansa, Emirates, Turkish, British, Qatar, SAS, Norwegian, Singaporean etc and it's same on all of the above. I don't know what airlines you take from Australia though