lukesampson / suburbs

Scrapes together a database of Australian suburbs

What?

This is a project to collect a simple, open source data set for Australian suburbs (including postcodes) from free sources.

Why?

If you're reading this, you probably agree that postcode data is useful for a variety of applications. While it is available from Australia Post, it's expensive and their license is restrictive.

So what are the other options? Geoscience Australia publishes the Australian Gazetteer, but it's only updated on a biennial basis in a proprietary format (Microsoft Access). Also, only South Australia, Tasmania and ACT make their postcode data available.

Hopefully the Gazetteer data will get better in future. But in the meantime, we'll rely on Wikipedia to fill in some gaps where possible.

How

These are the steps taken to generate this data

1. Download and extract suburb data from the Australian Gazetteer 2012 (details)

2. Get postcode data from Wikipedia (not implemented yet)