Forgotten Australia: The Parishes That Became the Suburbs We Live In

Templestowe, Victoria (formerly Parish of Bulleen)

In the 1800s, Australia’s emerging towns were mapped by colonial surveyors who divided the land into neat administrative parcels called parishes.
These divisions were laid over lands with far older histories, but they became the framework for the suburban grids and city layouts we recognise today.

Back then, you didn’t live in a suburb.
You lived in a parish.

Some parish names were borrowed from British towns. Others honoured early governors or explorers. A few were adapted—sometimes faithfully, sometimes clumsily—from local Indigenous words. Their borders were carefully measured on paper, even if the future of those places was anything but certain.

And while most people never used parish names in everyday language, the lines themselves quietly shaped the cities and suburbs that came later.

When the Map Stayed the Same but the Town Didn’t

Travel through a vintage real estate map and you’ll see something magical: places that don’t exist anymore.

Take Sydney.
The city we know today was once layered with parishes called St Philip, St James, St Andrew, and St Lawrence—names that sounded ecclesiastical and grand, but rarely spoken aloud by the people who lived there. A resident of Balmain didn’t say, “I’m heading to St Philip Parish.” They said, “I’m going across the water.”

Yet those parish borders still underpin modern neighbourhoods.
St Philip sits under today’s Millers Point, Barangaroo, and parts of the CBD.
St James covers Woolloomooloo and Potts Point.
St Lawrence wraps around Surry Hills, Haymarket, and the eastern CBD.

Melbourne was no different.
Long before South Melbourne was South Melbourne, it was Emerald Hill.
Northcote, Thornbury, and Preston once sat inside the sprawling Parish of Jika Jika.
Fitzroy North grew from the old Merri Parish.
Even the famous Hoddle Grid was originally just the Parish of Melbourne—a name that feels oddly small for what would become the state’s beating heart.

Brisbane’s parishes read like characters in a half-remembered story:
Enoggera, Indooroopilly, Bulimba, Nundah, Toombul.
Some of these names survived as suburbs; others slipped quietly into surveying archives. The old Parish of Toombul, for example, explains the eccentric diagonal streets near Brisbane’s north-east rail corridor.

Adelaide?
Before it was a city, it was a single neat parish—the Parish of Adelaide—a perfect rectangle on paper that evolved into one of the most distinctive CBD grids in the world.
Port Adelaide developed from the old Port Adelaide Parish, while coastal areas like Christies Beach and Port Noarlunga grew from the Noarlunga Parish.

Over in Perth, the early Parish of Perth covered what is now the CBD, Northbridge, and West Perth.
The fertile Swan Valley emerged from the Parish of Swan, while modern south-eastern suburbs like Cannington and Welshpool trace back to the Parish of Canning.

Even Tasmania, meticulously surveyed in its early years, carried parish names that guided future growth.
The Parish of Hobart covered the CBD, Battery Point, and North Hobart.
Launceston’s basin was shaped by the Parish of Launceston, while Glenorchy still carries the parish name unchanged.

The ACT inherited old NSW parishes before it became a territory:
Parish of Canberra (Civic and Acton), Yarrolumla (Yarralumla and Deakin), Ginninderra (the Belconnen region).

And in the Northern Territory—where “hundreds” often replaced parish names—the past lives on in the Hundred of Bagot (Nightcliff, Rapid Creek) and the Hundred of Goyder near Darwin.

Across the continent, these invisible units guided everything from where roads were laid to how blocks were sold and how farms were divided. The names faded. The borders stayed.

Ghost Lines Beneath Modern Streets

Walk any Australian city today and you’re walking over ghost lines—survey boundaries drawn 150 years ago that still influence street grids, block sizes, and odd-shaped corner lots.

This is why some suburbs form neat squares while others twist and fold.
You’re not imagining it.
You’re seeing decisions made by a man with a compass and a chain in 1852.

It’s also why some riverside suburbs form strange slivers. Surveyors often avoided low, flood-prone land, so the parish line zig-zagged away from soggy banks—creating shapes that still confuse planners today.

These quirks give old maps their magic. They show the moment before the land was fully known—before a parish became a neighbourhood, or a neighbourhood became a city.

“Vintage maps show Australia not as a finished place, but as a becoming place.”

The Parishes We Forgot—And How They Became Our Suburbs

Every Australian city hides these old divisions.
Sydney’s ecclesiastical grid. Melbourne’s sprawling county parishes. Brisbane’s river-shaped boundaries. Adelaide’s perfect rectangle. Hobart and Launceston’s colonial neatness. Perth’s Swan River parishes. Even the NT’s scattered “hundreds.”

Look at a modern suburb and you’re often looking at the ghost of a parish beneath it.

EdenEd

Eden,

Eden, New South Wales (Parish of Twofold Bay)

Why We Love These Maps Today

Vintage parish maps do something modern maps rarely do:
they show possibility.

You can see towns that never grew, subdivisions planned but never built, names that almost entered our vocabulary, neighbourhoods that were still bush, and coastlines guessed at imperfectly.

For many, owning one of these maps isn’t just decoration.
It’s a connection—to ancestry, to place, to memory, or simply to the romance of the past.

A Country Written, Erased, and Written Again

As Australians, we’re taught dates and explorers and battles.
But rarely are we taught how our land was administratively imagined—how lines on paper became a country.

Every parish line, every subdivision sketch, every ornate title map helped shape who we became.

And many of those names?
They’re still out there. Hidden in old prints. Waiting to be rediscovered.

Forgotten, yes.
But not lost.
Not as long as someone remembers to look—
and not as long as places still exist where these old maps are gathered, preserved,
and allowed to speak again.

Sometimes you don’t need to walk through an archive to find them.
Sometimes they’re right there on the wall,
quietly telling the story of the country we wrote in pencil before we wrote it in ink.