About this project

divs.au is an independent website dedicated to the visualisation of Australian federal electoral boundaries from 1901 until today.

The project

This project serves as a visual record of electoral geography, focusing on the physical boundaries of the divisions rather than political results or candidate biographies. While winning parties and candidates are included to provide necessary context for each era, the primary objective is to show exactly where the lines were drawn and how those boundaries sat across the Australian landscape in past elections.

Why this project exists

Interactive, street-level visualisations of historical electoral boundaries, like 1949, 1984, or even 2001, are notoriously difficult to access in a functional format. This site bridges that gap by reconstructing these past boundaries into a modern, interactive interface, allowing users to explore the geography of our electoral system that would otherwise only exist in static archival records.

Technical methodology

The maps are built through a rigorous geographic reconstruction process to ensure that the lines on the screen match the actual boundaries of the time. Each map is generated by overlaying spatial data to ensure the integrity of the divisions as they applied at the time.

Due to limitations with historic maps, some of the older division maps rely on modern roads and geography, instead of the features as they would have been at the time.

Data sources

Maps have been composed from records in the Australian Electoral Commission, Australian Bureau of Statistics, Australian Parliament House handbook and Wikipedia.

Division profiles, including winning members, changes to members, details of namesakes and division name categories have been compiled from the Australian Electoral Commission, Australian Parliament House handbook, Wikipedia and Adam Carr’s Election Archive.

Tools

Geographic data processing and boundary reconstruction are completed in QGIS and exported as GeoJSON files. Winners and division name data (including division name categories) are compiled as CSV files. The files are uploaded and rendered for the web using Leaflet.js

Standards and accessibility

This site is built with a focus on semantic integrity, performance, and cross-browser compatibility.

Web standards

The codebase adheres to modern HTML5 and CSS3 standards. By using semantic HTML and a folder-based directory structure, the site ensures that the underlying structure is logical and easy to navigate.

Accessibility

To assist with general readability, the site uses colours and typography that comply with accessibility standards.

divs.au is a spatial archive. Because the data and historical boundaries are tied directly to an interactive map, you must be able to use the visual map interface to access the project's content.

While I follow WCAG 2.1 principles for the site's navigation and text, there are currently no text-only or tabular alternatives for the maps. This presents a barrier for users with visual impairments or those relying on screen readers.

Contact

If you have questions, suggestions, or have identified an error in the data, please open an issue on the project's GitHub repository.