White Pages® News

Who’s calling Australia ‘home’ this Australia Day according to White Pages®?

January 21, 2010

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This Australia Day, we’ve decided to take a closer look at our White Pages® directories to see just who it is that calls Australia home, and to shed some light on the diversity the group of people who would call themselves ‘Aussies’.

It will come as no surprise that Australia really does belong to the Smiths, with their surname being the most common appearing in the White Pages. In fact in 2009 it appeared more than 60,000 times.  

That seems like a huge number, but it’s important to remember that while the Smith’s may appear most often – they don’t even account for 1% of all households in Australia (as measured by the Australian Bureau of Statistics in 2006). So in reality, even the most common of all surnames, is in percentage terms, not that common.

In fact, when you combine entries for all of the top 20 surnames published most often in the White Pages – names like Williams, Nguyen, Edwards, and Li - they still only account for a little over 5% of households. So the entries in the White Pages – just like the Australian population – represent great diversity, with most of our listings being made up of surnames held by only a handful of people.

The wide range of people that call Australia home and consider themselves Australian is one of the things we think is great about Australia, and White Pages® is proud of our role in helping Aussies connect.