• Hi Guest!

    The costs of running this forum are covered by Sea Lion Press. If you'd like to help support the company and the forum, visit patreon.com/sealionpress

Max's election maps and assorted others

Melbourne 1922-1946
I'd like to get to a point where I can map old federal elections too, but based on what I can find online, that point's not in the near future. That said, I did manage to find maps of the 1937 redistribution in Victoria (one for the state and one for Melbourne) showing both the old and new boundaries, which means I can make insets for Melbourne for virtually all the interwar elections.

Melbourne, federal elections, 1922-1946
val-au-melb-iw.png

These are, of course, extremely dull (aside from 1931), but they do help us see how the new blues look side-by-side with the old ones. I think my initial impression of "they can be combined with one another, but not with the old shades" was accurate.
 
I know Adam Carr has pretty comprehensive results, but I don't know about boundaries.
Also, regarding the blues, are you just revamping them or the rest of the color pallete?
Adam Carr's where I'm getting most of the info from.

And no, I'm sticking to the blues - the goal of splitting the blue shades into two new sets was so I could show the Swedish Liberals and Conservatives/Moderates together without having to give the former a colour they never used in practice.
 
Well, I was able to track down one interwar map of NSW showing state and federal electorates, so that means I'm able to do the corresponding map for Sydney (in part).

Sydney, federal elections, 1922-1931
val-au-sydney-iw.png

Quick disclaimer: I'm not actually sure if these are the 1922 or 1934 boundaries. The map was printed in 1930 according to metadata, but it also shows the Division of Watson rather than South Sydney, a name change that only came in with the 1934 redistribution, so... take it all with a grain of salt.

Anyway, this is a bit more interesting than Melbourne - quite a few swing electorates even before we get into the 1929 redwash and the complete pandemonium resulting from the 1931 three-way ALP split between Lang Labor, Federal Labor and the faction that went over to United Australia.

NSW state elections in this period were quite interesting, as I'm sure you can imagine, so I might go on to try to do those now.
 
NSW 2019
I wrote an actual description for something! Read it here.

New South Wales 2019
ddzbsan-9c6ac68c-0b64-4151-8394-db9021b959bf.png
 
NSW 2013 (K)
And the equivalent LGA map.

New South Wales, municipalities, 2013
nsw-lga-2013.png

Now, these boundaries are as depicted in the maps for the 2013 redistribution. The Liberal government that was fairly new at the time would carry out quite a few mergers and boundary reviews, with the result that the map - especially in Sydney - looks quite different today. I might attempt to update it at some point to reflect this.

And, of course, the map is drawn to scale with Victoria, which gives us the following combined map:

aus-lga.png

(and yes, South Australia's border really does have that weird skip in it, I double-checked that when aligning the two state maps)
 
Sydney 1922-1946
Quick disclaimer: I'm not actually sure if these are the 1922 or 1934 boundaries. The map was printed in 1930 according to metadata, but it also shows the Division of Watson rather than South Sydney, a name change that only came in with the 1934 redistribution, so... take it all with a grain of salt.
Update: they were, in fact, the 1934 set. I also found a map of the 1922 set, so here we go again.

Sydney, federal elections, 1922-1946
val-au-sydney-iw.png
 
NSW 1943 (K)
nsw-lga-1943.png

Here's a historical LGA map for NSW. The metadata says it's from 1943, and this seems to be accurate judging from the content - Hillston was folded back into Carrathool Shire in November 1943, while 1944 saw a big reorganisation in the Hunter region that this map predates.

You can see how the Western District was much, much bigger at the time, covering essentially the whole Darling Basin. Outside the five urban municipalities (of which Broken Hill had city status as one of four municipalities in the state, don't ask me why), services in this area were provided directly by the state government. Not that there were very many council services to provide in the bush - the shires basically only did road maintenance and bin collection, and neither would've really been possible to sustain on the local tax base. In the 50s, they created shire councils for basically the entire region, but an area the size of Hungary along the western border remains unincorporated to this day.

I'm going to have to sort out a key for Sydney at some point, but dear God, is it not a task that fills me with eagerness.
 
Last edited:
If I had to guess, I'd say Broken Hill had city status because it was the only really major settlement of its size in the Western District and was, even in the 1940s, a pretty solid mining community (IIRC from my own Australia research, it was home to one of the richest silver veins in the world).

Fun fact: it's also the only part of NSW that follows Central Time, largely because it was closer to Adelaide than Sydney or Canberra when the first rail lines were constructed to connect the mines to the wider world.

Second fun fact: the "Broken Hill" of the name has been completely destroyed by strip mining and none of the prominent hills in the area actually still exist.
 
If I had to guess, I'd say Broken Hill had city status because it was the only really major settlement of its size in the Western District and was, even in the 1940s, a pretty solid mining community (IIRC from my own Australia research, it was home to one of the richest silver veins in the world).
Oh, that’d do it then. AFAICT it got city status in 1907, so I have to assume it was the usual mining boomtown “obviously we’re going to keep growing forever” optimism.
 
For some reason, whenever I try and open your maps on a larger screen, they come up with a black instead of white background, making the text unreadable. Is that happening to anyone else, or is this just a "my computer is cursed" thing?
 
Last edited:
For some reason, whenever I try and open your maps on a larger screen, they come up with a black instead of white background, making the text unreadable. Is that happening to anyone else, or is this just a "my computer is cursed" thing?
Happens to me too.

If you're using Chrome, I think it does that with most forum-based images that have transparent backgrounds. I have to download the image and open it in Preview (on a mac) to read the enlarged text.
 
Back
Top