Forum:Divisions of Australian states

(Initial paragraphs adapted from another forum)

Counties or some more recent division?
Counties appear in many old records but have virtually disappeared from real life. Is there a better division to base a standard navbox on? Local Government Areas of Australia?

Robin Patterson 06:59, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

No reason why we couldn't have pages for old and new divisions. Robin Patterson 09:07, 10 July 2008 (UTC)


 * I don't like counties for Australia, I don't think they ever had any administrative or social significance, except in land tenure (though I could be corrected here), certainly nothing like the role they seem to have in the USA. The smallest divisions of a state like New South Wales that I think could be useful are the regional ones, like "New England", "Northern Rivers", "Monaro" etc. Even then, looking at the genealogies I have, the main division is between "Sydney" and "Regional" (ie not Sydney). I am loath to bother with categories below the state level in Australia. Thurstan 09:45, 20 July 2008 (UTC)

New South Wales
OK, maybe Brian Yap's relatives whose pages mention counties were a bit exceptional; I've not examined more than a few dozen of his thousands, and I've seen very few old Australian documents. In the absence of coherent cover of NSW regions in Wikipedia, please study and evaluate the fourteen regions defined by the Open Directory Project. The 13 non-Sydney regions would have an average population about double that of the average U.S. county, which puts them well inside the same order of magnitude. (Using Local Government Areas of Sydney would give a similar average population there.) I've copied the ODP map but I'm not much of an image manipulator. Commons has some useful maps but apparently not full coverage. Robin Patterson 13:25, 20 July 2008 (UTC)


 * Yes, the ODP names sound like the sort of names I would use to answer the question "where did your ancestors live?".
 * 203.129.53.92 21:51, 20 July 2008 (UTC) (sorry, it's me Thurstan)

Well, tentatively, here they are for creating initial pages (with the numbers being the current numbers of website profiles listed): Does that format look OK? Should we abbreviate to NSW? Robin Patterson 03:31, 21 July 2008 (UTC)
 * Central Coast (New South Wales)  (33)
 * Central West (New South Wales) (2)
 * Far West (New South Wales) (1)
 * Greater Sydney (New South Wales) (531) - population about 5 million needs subdividing itself
 * Hunter Valley (New South Wales) (62)
 * Illawarra (New South Wales) (23)
 * Murray (New South Wales) (0)
 * North Coast (New South Wales) (13)
 * North West (New South Wales) (10)
 * Northern Rivers (New South Wales) (32)
 * Orana (New South Wales) (2)
 * Riverina (New South Wales) (6)
 * South Coast (New South Wales) (22)
 * Southern Tablelands (New South Wales) (4)