What is Australia's largest suburb?

Which suburb is Australia's most populous? A recent question from one of our Local Government clients prompted this piece on our most populated suburbs and the pitfalls of looking at numbers without context.

Australia seems to have an obsession with "big things". You know, the Big Banana in Coffs Harbour, the Big Merino Sheep in Goulburn, the Big Mango in Bowen... There is even a Big Bogan in Nyngan, NSW (named after the Bogan river, and the Shire of the same name). But the other day I was asked by one of our Local Government clients, "What is Australia's biggest suburb?"

I assumed they meant "most populous", of course, rather than the largest area.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) has a definition called the "Suburb and Locality" classification, which groups together regions that share the same address (not postcode – rather, the name of the locality you'd put on your address, sometimes many of these in one postcode). The ABS recognises 15,382 suburbs and localities covering the whole of Australia. We can use the 2021 Census to rank them by population. Note that this classification is fundamentally different to the other rankings we've done in previous blogs, eg by Significant Urban Area and Urban Centre/Locality. In those classifications, for example, Melbourne and Sydney are each one location. But in the suburb-level classification, each is made up of a few hundred suburbs and surrounding localities. ("Melbourne" or "Sydney" in this classification is much smaller and relates only to the central city area.) The same applies to other urban areas.

Australia's 30 largest suburbs

The top 30 suburbs/localities by Census usual resident population in 2021 are shown here:

So, based on the 2021 Census, Point Cook (in the Victorian LGA of Wyndham) is the largest suburb/locality in Australia, with a population of 66,781 people, to answer the question I was asked. And it's actually grown since then. We have information on post-Census population growth by area only for those LGAs that subscribe to our Community Profiles (profile.id). Wyndham subscribes and current figures (from June 2023) show Point Cook now has 70,775 people. We also have population forecasts for those LGAs who subscribe to the forecast.id tool as well, some of these also show suburb totals into the future.

Perhaps in the tradition of Big Things, Point Cook should install a giant map of the suburb. Or just the "Big Person"?

What makes some suburbs larger?

The list shows an interesting trend. Many of the largest suburbs are areas on the fringes of our capital cities (particularly Melbourne), which have experienced very high population growth in recent years. These were formerly rural localities with small populations but moderately large areas, and retained their original names rather than being subdivided into new suburbs. The second largest is Craigieburn, on Melbourne's northern fringe, with the same characteristics. And multiple other areas in the City of Wyndham, in Melbourne's west, such as Tarneit, Truganina and Werribee, also make the list. These are large suburbs because they have not been further divided into new suburbs as the population has grown. In other cities, the growth areas on the fringe are more likely to have been subdivided into newly gazetted smaller suburbs, so they don't make the list. Within Melbourne, the City of Melton has gazetted many new suburbs in its growth areas, such as Weir Views, Strathtulloh and Fraser Rise.

Largely because of this trend, 19 of the 30 largest are in Victoria, 8 in New South Wales, 2 in WA and 1 in Queensland.

In contrast, South Australia's largest suburb, Morphett Vale, doesn't appear until #95 in the list. Adelaide has a lot of very small suburbs on average, many with populations less than 1,000.

It's not all about the fringe growth areas, though. The locality of Melbourne itself is the 4th largest suburb in Australia. There is always a lot of debate about whether Sydney or Melbourne is larger. This is usually taken to refer to the greater urban areas of these cities (by a few different measures). But on a locality level classification there is no comparison: Melbourne has more than triple the population of Sydney (54,941 people compared with 16,667). Almost no-one refers to either city just as the population of the central area, of course, and both are likely to have grown substantially since the Census – they were affected by COVID lockdown-era population declines and loss of student population.

Also in the list are quite a few regional centres. But not the ones we generally think of as the largest regional centres. There is no Newcastle, Geelong or Launceston on the list, because all these are broken down into smaller suburbs. The largest suburb in Queensland is Southport, on the Gold Coast, but it makes up only a small part of the Gold Coast population. The ones which do make the list are places like Dubbo, Port Macquarie, Mildura and Orange, which don't have officially gazetted suburbs within them and each represent as one big locality.

Reading between the numbers

Fun though it is to dig into this stuff, there's a serious side as well. I've noticed that often when characteristics of places are reported, whole numbers are used. For instance, where are the most reported crimes? Which places have the most births and deaths? Or this one from the ABS themselves recently on their Facebook feed: Top suburbs for people born in New Zealand. While the topic isn't too controversial, it illustrates the issue of using whole numbers. Because the largest suburb for people born in New Zealand in Victoria – you guessed it – Point Cook! And in NSW, WA and SA it's the largest suburbs in those states, too (Blacktown, Baldivis and Morphett Vale respectively). Generally, the larger the population the more likely it is to be high on any characteristic. Without using a rate, percentage or per-capita, articles such as this could simply be highlighting places with the largest overall population. (Keep this in mind next time you see a news report about the geographic distribution crime or obesity.)

Whenever we are comparing characteristics of areas of different sizes on our local-area information tools, such as the Community Profile, we use percentage of population by default, with the option to show raw numbers as needed. This is one of the core tenets in our approach to ensuring the data we share is made meaningful.

Another things to keep an eye out for: a lot of reporting in the media uses the term "suburb" to refer to another geography: SA2s (Statistical Area Level 2). These are not the same as suburbs, and many of those larger areas are broken up into multiple SA2s, while smaller suburbs are combined (eg. the SA2 labelled "Somerville" in this link on the ABS website includes the suburbs of Somerville, Tyabb and Baxter). In our tools, we tend to use suburbs or customised areas designed in consultation with our Local Government clients – whatever makes the most sense for people who live in that area.

What is Australia's smallest (least populated) suburb?

Which suburbs sit at the other end of the list? There are 689 localities which had a population of zero at the 2021 Census. While many are remote places which not too many people would have heard of, a few are well-known names where no one actually lives, such as Blue Mountains National Park in NSW and industrial suburbs in our cities with no residential population, including Tottenham (Vic), Port of Brisbane (Qld), Torrens Island (SA) and Herdsman (WA). And the largest by area? One of the most remote parts of Australia, the locality of Telfer, in the Pilbara of WA, with an area of over 178,000 square kilometres!