Suburbs and localities (Australia)

Suburbs and localities are the names of geographic subdivisions in Australia, mainly for address purposes. The term locality is used in rural areas, while the equivalent in urban areas is suburbs. This Australian usage is very different from the common American and British usage of the word "suburb", which typically means a smaller, frequently separate residential community outside, but close to, a larger city. The Australian usage is closer to the American or British use of "district" or "neighborhood", and can be used to refer to any portion of a city. As a result, while a Londoner would never refer to the City of London as a "suburb", and a New Yorker would not use the word to describe midtown Manhattan, an Australian would naturally speak of the Central Business District of Sydney as being one of Sydney's "suburbs".

Sometimes locality is used to refer to both localities and suburbs, and they are also called address localities. Localities are also known as towns and rural districts in Victoria, such as on various maps. Note that they are different from the Australian Bureau of Statistics's Urban Centre Localities, a statistical division. Localities have also been used to refer to locations within cities that are not designated suburbs.

Localities and suburbs are determined and declared by the local council in which they are located based on criteria such as community recognition and is subject to approval by the state's geographical names board, which, however, does not prevent them from overlapping several local government areas since they are otherwise independent from them. In unincorporated areas, localities are declared by the relevant state authority.

Localities have existed in the past as informal units, before the 1996 decision of the Intergovernmental Committee on Surveying and Mapping and the Committee for Geographical Names in Australasia (CGNA) to name and establish official boundaries for all localities and suburbs. Recently, there has been a process to formally define their boundaries and to gazette them, which is almost complete. In March 2006, only South Australia and the Northern Territory had not completed this process.Postcodes now relate closely with the boundaries of localities.

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