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Australian demographics


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Because a recent correspondent was telling me about Perth, I thought I'd look up some numbers.  Here are the top ten largest cities in Australia.  Thought Graeme and Des and all might be interested.  If I tried to make a comparable list for the US, I'm sure I'd get some or a lot of it wrong.  We've had great changes in the populations of our cities in the past two decades.

 

Incidentally, I've never heard of three of these cities, numbers 6, 9 and 10.

 

C

 

Rank GCCSA/SUA State/Territory June 2015[1]
population
Percentage of
national population
1 Sydney New South Wales 4,920,970 20.70%
2 Melbourne Victoria 4,529,496 19.05%
3 Brisbane Queensland 2,308,720 9.71%
4 Perth Western Australia 2,039,193 8.58%
5 Adelaide South Australia 1,316,779 5.54%
6 Gold CoastTweed Heads Queensland/New South Wales 624,918 2.63%
7 NewcastleMaitland New South Wales 434,454 1.83%
8 CanberraQueanbeyan Australian Capital Territory/New South Wales 424,666 1.79%
* Australian Capital Territory Australian Capital Territory[a] 390,706 1.64%
9 Sunshine Coast Queensland 302,122 1.27%
10 Wollongong New South Wales 292,388 1.23%
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Technically, numbers 6, 7, and 9 are not cities, but regions. The Gold Coast and Sunshine Coast are popular tourist areas south and north of Brisbane. The Gold Coast can be treated as a single city as it's a contiguous strip of development from Tweeds Head up to the theme parks (one of the reasons it's a popular tourist area) at the north end. Similarly for the Sunshine Coast, though the development there is not as contiguous or dense as it is along the Gold Coast. Newcastle and Maitland are two cities in New South Wales, located about 35 km apart.

 

The Wikipedia article where you got the list is actually showing something other than cities, as described at the top of the article. They're definitely metropolitan areas, but most people wouldn't consider either the Gold Coast or Sunshine Coast to be cities. Canberra-Queanbeyan is a different situation, as they're more one city spread over two states/territories. Another example of that is Albury-Wodonga (number 19 in the list) where you have one "city" that's partly in New South Wales (Albury) and partly in Victoria (Wodonga).

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