Suburb versus Neighbourhood

For the sake of American readers, I’ve been using the term ‘neighbourhood’ in my posts, but I realised that I’d unconsciously switched to the Australian term ‘suburb’ in my post last night. Consequently, a bit of explanation may be in order.

I live in the suburb of Evatt. This doesn’t mean that I live in an entity outside of or separate to Canberra. The term ‘suburb’—which literally means ‘under-city’—typically refers to a part of a city in Australia. Consequently, Evatt is what most Americans would call a ‘neighbourhood,’ akin to Sugar House in Salt Lake City or Back Bay in Boston.

Named suburbs aren’t just for certain historic or quirky quarters, however. Canberra consists entirely of dozens of these suburbs, and everyone lives in one. Even the commercial centre of the city (as much as Canberra has a centre) occupies its own suburb: Civic. And ANU has its own suburb as well: Acton.

Because Canberra is a planned city, each suburb has been carefully planned too. A typical suburb houses about 2,500-4,000 people, is bounded by major roads, and has public green space running through its centre. This green space always includes the suburb’s primary school and local shops and contains an integrated network of footpaths, making it possible for most people to shop or go to school by foot or pushbike without ever touching a road.

Things are considerably less neat in Sydney, but even this teeming city of 4,000,000 people is really just a series of named suburbs, each with its own individual character.

This distinction, however, is of lesser importance in Australia in large part because there’s no such thing as city government anyway. Thus, though Sydney has a ceremonial lord-mayor (to cut ribbons and wave in parades), the city is actually governed by the New South Wales state government. And Canberra is similarly managed by our territorial government.

Happy New Year!

Fireworks are traditional on New Year’s Eve, but last night we here in Canberra rang in the New Year with a rather-more-exciting-than-usual fireworks show courtesy of Mother Nature. Several hours of blinding lightning and rumbling thunder were accompanied in large parts of the city by nearly 40mm of rain—and, in some southern suburbs, almost a metre of hail! To get an idea of what this looked like, check out the photo below, taken from this morning’s Canberra Times.


I was watching the storm cell tracking north on the Bureau of Meteorology’s radar site, hoping that it would maintain its path since it was headed straight for our drought-parched garden, but it took a sharp turn west just a few kilometres south of our suburb. This disappointed me—until I learnt later how severe the storm had been.

I found this out firsthand from my good mate, Michael, whose car actually stalled out in waist-deep water on his way up to our New Year’s Eve get-together last night. He had to be rescued by a big truck with a bulbar, and even then he and his brother arrived just a few minutes before midnight. At least they made it safely.

And, considering how severe the drought has been this year, one can’t really complain about such a generous outpouring of water.