Australia’s great suburban centre
It is much parodied and even ridiculed — especially by those in the ‘sophisticated’ inner city — but there is something special about Middle Australia; our largest single cultural group.
Darryl Kerrigan was right. There is something special about suburbia. Not just any suburbia but Australian suburbia. It is much parodied even ridiculed and especially by those who live in the “sophisticated” but congested inner city. So what does life in the ‘burbs actually look like? And does it vary from city to city?
Come with me in search of Australia’s great suburban heartland.
Australia’s largest cities invariably trail off into long tendrils, corridors, of McMansions extending 50km and more from the city centre. Here is a world of big houses, of big mortgages and of long commutes.
But this is not the suburban heartland; this is a new suburban frontier being formed and styled and built every day.
I believe the heart and soul of middle Australia sits squarely amid the expanse of a vast suburban savanna, where separate houses on separate blocks of land dominate the landscape to the horizon in every direction. Finding the middle suburban heartland is an issue of geography and demography and of trial and error.
And it’s not as simple an exercise at it sounds. At what point across each of our five largest cities is there unfettered access to the greatest number of Australians within a 10km radius?
This kind of information is vital to big-box retailers, but I think it also nurtures and celebrates Australia’s suburban culture.
The epicentre or centroid of the largest 10km-radius salami-like slice of the Australian people is necessarily positioned between 13km and 20km from the central business district. Any closer to the city centre and pure suburbia gives way to density’s apartmentia. Any farther afield results in part of the slice-of-suburbia taking in non-urban bushland or farmland. No, the epicentre of Australia’s middle suburbia sits more or less midway between the cool inner city and the Nappy Valley edge.
After some trial and error I have identified what is possibly the largest expanses of the suburban life form in each of the five biggest cities in Australia. The resultant population thus scooped up in this 20km diameter circle ranges from around one million in Sydney and Melbourne to less than 500,000 in Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide.
The epicentre suburbs are Burwood for Melbourne, Parramatta for Sydney, Runcorn for Brisbane, Leeming for Perth and Green Fields for Adelaide. These places offer access to what is possibly the greatest number of suburban Australians in every direction for a radius of 10km. If there is a ground zero, a genesis point, a suburban Garden of Eden, it is these places for they lie at the demographic centre of Australia’s deeply suburban way of life.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics breaks down the metropolitan area into a series of suburbs.
There are for example 61 suburbs comprising Melbourne’s suburban expanse centred on Burwood and which converts to around 16,000 people per suburb. Melbourne’s middle suburban heartland is a bit like 61 country towns the size of Horsham all jammed together.
Sydney’s heartland is much the same: 59 suburbs the size of Grafton all jammed and connected together.
Middle Australia may be the largest single cultural group on the Australian continent but, at its core, it comprises smaller communities (of, say, county-town size) all raising families, paying off mortgages, commuting to the city, holding traditional values (see evidence later), and very much interested in beautifying and embellishing the family home with the help of Bunnings and Harvey Norman.
Parody it if you will but it is also a cultural truth about Australia and the way we live. And when I consider how people live in other developed-world cities, I think our suburbia is a pretty good way of life. There are questions of sustainability, but with some effort and especially with more workers working from home this way of life can be made more efficient (that is, less carbon emissions).
What strikes me about the suburban slices is the consistency in how we live. At the last census there was roughly one local job per two local residents in each slice. About one-third of the sampled middle suburbia population was born overseas. About a third hold a mortgage.
More than half believe in a god; they hold traditional values. Interestingly, the Parramatta slice is the most devout and contains the highest proportion of the population born overseas (49 per cent). These figures are skewed by the Indian community that dominates Harris Park near Parramatta.
Melbourne’s biggest migrant enclaves are located outside the Burwood slice.
Australia is an extraordinarily multicultural community even at the everyday suburban level. At the last census 17,000 overseas visitors spent the night in Burwood’s middle suburbia. These aren’t high-end tourists staying in five-star city hotels; these are, in all probability, friends and family visiting new migrants and probably marvelling at the suburban abundance of the Australian way of life.
Again in the Burwood slice — containing 4 per cent of the Australian population — 23,000 visitors from within Australia spent census night in this most suburban part of Melbourne. Then there are 37,000 foreign students, perhaps attached to any of the three local universities namely Deakin, Swinburne and Monash.
I am not getting the feeling that this example of middle suburbia is some disconnected cultural backwater. Indeed, the metrics suggest otherwise. middle Australia may hold traditional values, it’s people may commute, raise families and take an inordinate sense of pride in their home — indeed, their castle — but this community is also deeply connected into their extended families.
Local residents are immersed in the cultural influences of visitors flooding in from intrastate, from interstate and from overseas. The multicultural youth presence (students) — no doubt somewhat subdued by the pandemic — delivers a pulsating energy to otherwise quite quiet places within striking distance of university campuses.
Of course the Parramatta slice sits at the centre of the Greater Sydney Commission’s grand vision for Sydney whereby Parramatta emerges as the Harbour City’s second CBD. And that plan very much makes sense, although in due course this may push Sydney’s pure suburban culture even further to the west. (A bit like the way the Celts were pushed to the edges of the British Isles.) We will know that this cultural transformation is under way when black-clad Surry Hills hipsters begin to surface in Parramatta’s cool laneways.
Brisbane offers two versions of unbroken suburban expanse: northside and southside. The southside’s Runcorn choice offers more population within a 10km radius and it includes the demographic influences of Griffith University positioned at Mount Gravatt. Like some grand demographic recipe, the addition of the vital university ingredient delivers zest and the vibrancy of youth to Brisbane’s middle suburbia.
I must admit to never having heard of Perth’s Leeming until undertaking this exercise. But its 10km slice takes in the youth influences of Murdoch and Curtin Universities, both based on the city’s southside. Perth’s urban form tends to elongate rather than bunching up, thus creating the kind of incubator necessary to bake a big suburban pie.
Adelaide’s Green Fields scoops up much of the city’s northern suburbs. But the 10km radius includes the thinly populated port as well as nearby industrial and air base precincts. This explains why Adelaide’s slice contains the fewest people of the five slices examined.
All things considered, the single slice that offers what I think is the best example of middle suburban culture — in a single salami-like slice — is Melbourne’s Burwood. Indeed I would argue that Australia’s cultural history agrees with my assessment. And that is because within this circle of suburbia centred on Burwood there is evidence of a suburban lifestyle that is much loved, greatly celebrated and vigorously projected to the rest of the nation.
Barry Humphries conceptualised his parody of middle suburbia Edna Everage (and whom he would place in distant Moonee Ponds) from his Camberwell home, 5km from Burwood.
The middle suburban cul-de-sac in which the soap opera Neighbours is filmed is located in Vermont, 8km from Burwood. The 1974 pop song Balwyn Calling by Australia’s Skyhooks chose to recognise the genteel suburb of Balwyn, 7km from Burwood. I don’t think that song would have worked citing Narre Warren or Parramatta or Caboolture.
The conclusion that comes from all of this is that the way of life in middle suburbia, or at least in the slices sampled, is pretty much the same. Harvey Norman and Bunnings and others have got the model right. Suburban Australians appear to have much the same values and behaviours. Most want a backyard gazebo and a flatscreen television. There are differences but only substantially in densities.
The similarities, I think, are far greater, such as the cosmopolitan population base, the coming and going of friends and family from within and beyond Australia, the radiating influence of universities and their youthful energetic zesty cohorts.
I don’t see a staid and provincial middle suburbia in these suburban slices. I see an energetic, connected, aspirational people wanting to build a better life for themselves and for their families.
And when you think about it, that’s not such a bad aspiration.
Bernard Salt is managing director of The Demographics Group; research by data scientist Hari Hara Priya Kannan.