You may have heard it said that there are 3 kinds of lies – black lies, white lies and statistics. Well here are some of the latter kind courtesy of the ABS. In Oz we are able to access data for our own suburbs and discover what kind of place we live in. Hopefully this will not come as a surprise to us!

I thought these two sets of stats were particularly interesting for Butler:(You will need to click on them to see them in larger form)

The first shows the religious orientation of local people. The highest category was ‘no religion’ with 26.6%, followed by Anglicansim 24.4% and Catholicism 20.9%. The highest ‘evangelical’ grouping were the presbyterian/reformed crew with 2.4%. Baptists didn’t make the summary as there are only 0.8% of us!

Given that many will have signed up as Catholic or Anglican by birth but would not be practicing at the moment the degree of religious engagement is probably much lower than it appears. I think there were 10-15 people in the Anglican church last I heard and there is no Catholic church in Butler. That’s not said to disparage my Anglo/Cath friends, but rather it does serve to highlight the secularity of the Oz landscape.

The second table shows why Butler is often called ‘Little Britain’. 22% of the population here are from the England. In fact only 55% of the suburb was born in Oz! As you move around the place it doesn’t feel highly multi-cultural as most of the ‘foreigners’ are white skinned. The presence of a British goods shop at the local shopping centre and the accents I hear as I drop the kids at school sometimes make me wonder if there are more POMs here than in London!

If you’d like to know more of the place we live in then you can go here.

(By the way – some of you may wonder why I refer to our suburb as ‘Butler’ in places and at other times as ‘Brighton’. It is because the official name is Butler, and the ‘marketing name’ of the development was Brighton. We just got used to saying Brighton)