Melbourne Demographics

Now I'm onto demographics. I'm excited. I like statistics. Well, I like the basic stuff that I can understand. The complicated stuff confuses me.

Lord Wiki says that Melbourne is multicultural. I like multicultural places. You get more interesting food. Fort Worth is kind of boring when it comes to cuisine.

Melbourne has the most Indian and Sri Lankan folks in Australia. I think this means we'll find a lot of good Indian restaurants. See with me, ethnicity all comes down to food.

Now let's go back in history. Before the gold rush, all the immigrants (or almost all) were British and Irish. I wouldn't want to visit Melbourne back then. I don't think I'd like that food too much.

The gold rush brought Americans, Germans, and Chinese folks. Good. Chinese food! That's what we had last night for dinner. Fort Worth Chinese food is not that great, though.

World War II brought even more variety to Melbourne. A lot of Greeks and Italians came aboard, and also many Lebanese and Turkish.

Thirty-four percent of Melbourne's population is foreign born. That's pretty impressive.

The most common spoken-at-home language besides English is Italian. Greek is third, and Chinese is fourth.

Lord Wiki has a population chart. It says that the projected population of Melbourne in 2056 is 7.9 million. That's a bit scary. Right now it's at 4 million. So it's going to almost double. Things are gonna get way too squishy. Well, hopefully some of us will be living in space by then.

There's also a chart about where folks come from.

The top ten source of immigrants are: the UK, Italy, Vietnam, China, New Zealand, Greece, India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and The Philippines.

I just went to Lord Wiki's main page on Melbourne demographics. It shows what neighborhoods have which groups. That's fun. Oh wait...and down here, he shows where to find the different foods.

Lygon street is for Italian food. I think they're the ones that have the festival where Gabrielle Cilmi was discovered.

Little Bourke Street has Chinatown.

Lonsdale Street has Greek Cuisine.

Central Footscray has Asian and African. Tim and I have bad luck with African food, although we've done only Egyptian and Ethiopian. Actually, it's only the Ethiopian that we've had problems with.

Caulfield has Jewish food.

Speaking of Jews, now we get into religion.....

The most popular religion in Melbourne is Catholicism, but that's only at 28%. The next most popular religion is NO religion. And that's MY religion. I'd fit in well there.

Forty percent of Australian Jews live in Melbourne, and it has the highest number of Holocaust survivors in Australia. It's the highest per capita outside of Israel. That's pretty amazing.

Sixty-four percent of people in Melbourne are Christian.

There's 300,000 Muslims.

And then there's other religions as well.

The Atheist Foundation of Australia seems to believe that the 20% of nonreligious people in Australia are also nonbelievers.

I'm a HUGE believer. I'm just not religious. I don't go to a place of worship. I don't have a religion. But I'm not atheist.

It annoys me when people confuse nonreligious with nonbelieving. It's not just atheists who do this. Christians will do it as well. To some, if you don't go to church, then you're atheist.

There might be a lot of atheists in Melbourne, though. The Atheist Foundation says a study done in 2008 found that 31% of Australians didn't believe in God, an afterlife, etc.

The numbers add up in an interesting way. If there's 31% of people not believing, and only 20% of people don't have a religion....well, that would mean there's some people with a religion and not believing in it. There's Jewish people like that. They go to Temple or Synagogue, yet they don't believe in the spiritual stuff.