The Australian Population Map

The Australian Bureau of Statistics has for the first time released population in a 1 km² grid format. The data represents the Usual Resident Population (URP) from the 2011 Census of Population and Housing.

The Guardian has used the data to create an interactive map of Australian population density. The Most Detailed Map of Australian Population Density Ever provides a heat map of Australian population density using the Mapbox platform.


The 2011 Australian census has also been used to create some other interesting interactive maps. Australia's Special Broadcasting Service, a multilingual broadcasting service for ethnic communities, has used the census data to map the top three birthplaces of immigrants in suburbs and towns across Australia.

Where Australia's Immigrants Were Born uses the Mapbox mapping platform to visualize the countries of births of Australian immigrants. The article actually contains a series of maps, one showing the country as a whole, a number of maps covering the major cities and another map of the whole country which excludes immigrants from England and New Zealand.


The Sydney Morning Herald also used the census data to create an interesting mapped analysis of the languages spoken in the city. The map shows the top non-English languages spoken in each of the city's suburbs, the density of English as a first language and the linguistic diversity in each neighbourhood.

Sydney's Melting Pot of Language reveals that east Asians predominantly live in the north shore while Arabic speakers dominate the western suburbs. Over 250 different languages are spoken in the city and nearly 40 percent speak a non-English language as their first tongue.

Accompanying the mapped visualization is a bar graph showing the numbers of speakers of each of the non-English languages spoken in the city. The graph groups the languages into global regions but you can select any of the region bars to view a percentage breakdown of the individual languages.