Talk:Wongaling Beach, Queensland

Wongaling Beach is not a suburb of Mission Beach
Wongaling Beach is not a suburb of Mission Beach, nor vice versa. Both places (and also South Mission Beach) are gazetted as populated places (aka towns) and bounded localities in their own right. None are suburbs. Please see and  for their official status. Kerry (talk) 05:13, 7 May 2018 (UTC)

Hi Kerry thanks for the info. Sorry I was just referencing it as a suburb as that's how it's listed on the census. Are you able to help me with trying to reference Wongaling Beach as part of the greater Mission Beach area? Would saying Wongaling Beach village is part of Mission Beach town be suitable? That's how they've been referred to on the Mission Beach page. Cheers.

. The Australian Bureau of Statistics is not responsible for the naming and gazetting of towns, suburbs, etc. That is the job of the various state place naming boards. For Queensland, that information is at the Qld Govt's Place Names search. According to it, Mission Beach, South Mission Beach and Wongaling Beach are *all* towns (that's what they mean by "population centres") and localities (an area with a well-defined boundary). They are not gazetted as suburbs. This is probably because their urban areas are not contiguous (which is more-or-less what it means to be a town, there is a centre from which the suburbs radiate out). If you want to see something that is gazetted as a suburb, try something like North Ward in Townsville which is gazetted as a suburb. In Queensland, any place with defined boundaries is either a suburb or a locality (not both). Some localities are also towns. It is not so common for suburbs to be towns but there are some -- this generally occurs when one town/city has grown so much that its suburbs have overtaken another town and its suburbs. Such places still tend to possess "town centre" character and are still seen by many people in surrounding suburbs as much. Unfortunately the nomenclature of city/town/suburb/locality is becoming more and more complex in the vast urban sprawls (mega-cities) that exist, e.g. South-East Queensland which is now uninterrupted housing from the NSW border to the Sunshine Coast. But it's still more straightforward outside of SEQ. But back to the ABS, they have to divide up Australia into larger chunks (e.g. states), then break it into smaller chunks like local government area or towns, and down to the level of suburbs/localities (they also go lower but that's not a level of granuality of interest to Wikipedia). They define a State Suburb as being something more-or-less the equivalent of a suburb OR a locality so their use of the term State Suburb isn't saying that a place is a suburb of anything in real life. If you look in the ABS at the entries for Mission Beach, South Mission Beach, and Wongaling Beach, you will see they are all available as both an State Suburb (they are a suburb/locality) and as an Urban Centre (which is the ABS way of saying "they look a lot like a town to us"). Again what the ABS provides UCL data for isn't exactly the same as towns/populations centres as gazetted by the Qld Govt but it's usually somewhat similar. Sometimes UCL data is the same as SSC data for the same place name and sometimes not (it depends if the ABS think the outliers from the main urban areas are fringe dwellers, e.g. large acreage lots, or genuinely rural, e.g. farms, you can read their full explanation). When we look at Mission Beach SSC vs UCL, it's the same population. Ditto Wongaling Beach. When we look at South Mission Beach SSC vs UCL, it's a slightly different population (932 for the SSC but only 920 for the UCL). What this tells us is that in South Mission Beach, they think 12 people should be classified as living with the boundaries of the locality but not within the boundaries of the population centre and if you compare the two maps on the ABS pages, you see there is a big geographic difference and, looking closely at the satellite view in Google Maps, there do appear to be a small cluster of buildings right down the south of South Mission Beach near to Kennedy Bay, so perhaps that's where the missing 12 live, too far away from the main South Mission Beach urban area to be considered part of it. So to summarise all this, neither the Qld Govt (nor the ABS) think that despite their obvious physical proximity, Mission Beach, Wongaling Beach and South Mission Beach are not related to each other than being within the same local government area. Sorry that's all rather long, but I hope it goes some way to explaining the situation and while you have to consult a number of sources to really get a handle on what is going on. A very useful tool for writing geography about Queensland geography on Wikipedia is the Qld Globe which is the Qld Govt's official source of mapping of boundaries etc. I usually have the Qld Globe open whenever I write Qld geography on Wikipedia. Does the Bruce Highway pass through Somewhere or not? Turn on the locality boundaries and the roads layers and you can see quickly if it does or it doesn't or it's just running immediately north of it or whatever. Kerry (talk) 03:01, 14 May 2018 (UTC)