The Gazetteer of Australia is an index or dictionary of the location and spelling of geographical names across Australia. Geographic names include towns, suburbs and roads, plus geographical features such as hills, rivers, and lakes.
The index is compiled by the Intergovernmental Committee on Surveying and Mapping (ICSM) from determinations made by state, territory, and Australian government agencies.
The authorities that work on geographic names in Australia are as follows:
As of January 2012, there are 370,000 place names in Australia. These are searchable in an online database hosted by Geoscience Australia and the entire data set can be downloaded here.
Technical and further education or simply TAFE, is the common name in English-speaking countries in Oceania for vocational education, as a subset of tertiary education. TAFE institutions provide a wide range of predominantly vocational courses.
The Uniting Church in Australia (UCA) was founded on 22 June 1977, when most congregations of the Methodist Church of Australasia, about two-thirds of the Presbyterian Church of Australia and almost all the churches of the Congregational Union of Australia united under the Basis of Union. According to the church, it had 243,000 members in 2018. In the 2016 census, about 870,200 Australians identified with the church; in the 2011 census, the figure was 1,065,796. The UCA is Australia's third-largest Christian denomination, behind the Catholic and the Anglican Churches. There are around 2,000 UCA congregations, and 2001 National Church Life Survey (NCLS) research indicated that average weekly attendance was about 10 per cent of census figures.
The Parliaments of the Australian states and territories are legislative bodies within the federal framework of the Commonwealth of Australia.
Local government is the third level of government in Australia, administered with limited autonomy under the states and territories, and in turn beneath the federal government. Local government is not mentioned in the Constitution of Australia, and two referendums in 1974 and 1988 to alter the Constitution relating to local government were unsuccessful. Every state/territory government recognises local government in its own respective constitution. Unlike the two-tier local government system in Canada or the United States, there is only one tier of local government in each Australian state/territory, with no distinction between counties and cities.
In Australia, electoral districts for the Australian House of Representatives are called divisions or more commonly referred to as electorates or seats. There are currently 151 single-member electorates for the Australian House of Representatives.
The Geographical Names Board of New South Wales, a statutory authority of the Department of Customer Service in the Government of New South Wales, is the official body for naming and recording details of places and geographical names in the state of New South Wales, Australia.
The Surveyor General of Western Australia is the person nominally responsible for government surveying in Western Australia.
John Clements Wickham was a Scottish explorer, naval officer, magistrate and administrator. He was first lieutenant on HMS Beagle during its second survey mission, 1831–1836, under captain Robert FitzRoy. The young naturalist and geologist Charles Darwin was a supernumerary on the ship, and his journal was published as The Voyage of the Beagle. After that expedition, Wickham was promoted to Commander and made captain of the Beagle on its third voyage, from 1837 and conducted various maritime expeditions and hydrographic surveys along the Australian coastline.
Australia uses three main time zones: Australian Western Standard Time, Australian Central Standard Time, and Australian Eastern Standard Time. Time is regulated by the individual state governments, some of which observe daylight saving time (DST). Australia's external territories observe different time zones.
The states and territories are federated administrative divisions in Australia, ruled by regional governments that constitute the second level of governance between the federal government and local governments. States are self-governing polities with incomplete sovereignty and have their own constitutions, legislatures, departments, and certain civil authorities that administer and deliver most public policies and programmes. Territories can be autonomous and administer local policies and programmes much like the states in practice, but are still constitutionally and financially subordinate to the federal government and thus have no true sovereignty.
The following lists events that happened during 1828 in Australia.
RSPCA Australia is an Australian peak organisation established in 1981 to promote animal welfare. Each state and territory of Australia has an RSPCA organisation that predates and is affiliated with RSPCA Australia.
The first colonies of the British Empire on the continent of Australia were the penal colony of New South Wales, founded in 1788, and the Swan River Colony, founded in 1829. Over the next few decades, the colonies of New Zealand, Queensland, South Australia, Van Diemen's Land, and Victoria were created from New South Wales, as well as an aborted Colony of North Australia. On 1 January 1901, these colonies, excepting New Zealand, became states in the Commonwealth of Australia. Since federation, the internal borders have remained mostly stable, except for the creation of some territories with limited self-government: the Northern Territory from South Australia, to govern the vast, sparsely populated centre of the country; the split of the Northern Territory into Central Australia and North Australia, and then the quick merger of those back into the Northern Territory; and the Australian Capital Territory, a federal district ceded from New South Wales.
Lands administrative divisions of Australia are the cadastral divisions of Australia for the purposes of identification of land to ensure security of land ownership. Most states term these divisions as counties, parishes, hundreds, and other terms. The eastern states of Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, and Tasmania were divided into counties and parishes in the 19th century, although the Tasmanian counties were renamed land districts in the 20th century. Parts of South Australia (south-east) and Western Australia (south-west) were similarly divided into counties, and there were also five counties in a small part of the Northern Territory. However South Australia has subdivisions of hundreds instead of parishes, along with the Northern Territory, which was part of South Australia when the hundreds were proclaimed. There were also formerly hundreds in Tasmania. There have been at least 600 counties, 544 hundreds and at least 15,692 parishes in Australia, but there are none of these units for most of the sparsely inhabited central and western parts of the country.
The Permanent Committee on Place Names (PCPN) created from the various Australian and New Zealand committees on geographical names. The PCPN started in 1984 as the Committee for Geographical Names in Australia (CGNA) and it was renamed in 2005. It was integrated within the Intergovernmental Committee on Surveying and Mapping (ICSM) in 1993. It is also associated with the Geospatial and Earth Monitoring Division of Geoscience Australia. It contributes to the United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names.
Suburbs and localities are the names of geographic subdivisions in Australia, used mainly for address purposes. The term locality is used in rural areas, while the term suburb is used in urban areas. Australian postcodes closely align with the boundaries of localities and suburbs.
Each state and territory of Australia determines whether or not to use daylight saving time (DST). However, during World War I and World War II all states and territories had daylight saving by federal law, under the defence power in section 51 of the constitution. In 1968, Tasmania was the first state since the war to adopt daylight saving. In 1971, New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, and the Australian Capital Territory also adopted daylight saving, while Western Australia and the Northern Territory did not. Queensland abandoned daylight saving in 1972. Queensland and Western Australia have observed daylight saving over the past 40 years from time to time on a trial basis.