Australia’s largest cities and towns – 1986 and 2016

Cast your mind back to 1986 – a time of shoulder pads, mullets, fluffy jumpers and dangly earrings. Hawthorn won the VFL premiership, university education was still free (just), and Bananarama’s version of “Venus” spent seven weeks at the top of the charts.

1986 was also a Census year, and the results show that 15.6 million people were counted in Australia. Compare this to the 24.4 million counted in 2016 – it’s stating the obvious but there has been significant growth in population over the last 30 years. Australia’s cities and towns have been a focus for much of this growth, and the ways in which they’ve changed is the focus of this blog.

The joys of geography

As with any analysis of this kind, geography matters. Before we do a ‘then and now’ comparison of cities, we need to make sure the place we’re talking about ‘then’ is the same place we’re looking at ‘now’.

The ABS produces a geographic classification to determine the spatial boundaries for which statistical data is released. Since 2011, this has been the Australian Statistical Geography Standard (ASGS), but previously it was the Australian Statistical Geography Classification (ASGC).

Users of .id’s local government tools will be familiar with Local Government Areas (LGAs) and small areas (generally based on gazetted localities). One of the lesser used geographies is Urban Centres/Localities – or UCLs. UCLs classify Australia’s cities and towns into geographic spatial units, which are quite distinct from LGAs and SA2s.

In the new ASGS, UCLs are comprised of SA1s, but in the ASGC they are comprised of collection districts (CDs). This means that they are subject to change between Censuses and this affects larger urban centres in particular. I still remember the furore created when the geographic boundary of the Melbourne UCL was enlarged in 2001 to include a number of towns on the Mornington Peninsula – the classification rules dictated the change was necessary but it had the impact of adding several thousand people to the Melbourne UCL population.

Australia’s urban hierarchy

Regardless of boundary changes, the UCL structure provides interesting insights into how Australia’s urban population has changed in the 30 years between 1986 and 2016.

The urban hierarchy of Australia shows a small number of large cities that dominate the social and economic landscape and this has been the case since European settlement. Most of Australia’s states and territories have a capital that is many times larger than the next sized city. This is taken to the extreme in South Australia where Adelaide (1.17 million) is more than 40 times larger than Gawler (26,070) and Mount Gambier (25,770), the second and third largest urban centres respectively. On the other hand, the dominance of the state capital in Tasmania is far less, with Hobart (177,908) only about twice the size of Launceston (75,166).

The table below shows the change in Australia’s urban hierarchy between 1986 and 2016. It is inspired by the work of Graeme Hugo, a distinguished demographer whose many research interests included settlement patterns.

Clearly, there has been strong growth in the number of UCLs with more than 5,000 people (161 in 1986 to 213 in 2016), but the major changes have been at the upper end. In 1986, there were no UCLs with a population over 4 million persons, but by 2016 there were two – Sydney and Melbourne.

While the two cities have undergone periods of rapid growth, some of the increase in the population has also occurred as the urban areas have expanded outwards, swallowing up former towns that are now outer suburbs. For instance, Cranbourne was an urban centre with a population of 14,000 in 1986, but is now part of Melbourne’s outer south-eastern suburbs and the population is included in the Melbourne UCL.

For this reason, it’s not entirely appropriate to look at the percentage change in population over the 30 years, as the boundaries are subject to change. This stands in contrast to the small area geography in profile.id where the boundaries are fixed over time so that patterns of demographic and social change can be more accurately assessed.