Locality

What's in a (place) name?

October 3, 2019

We've found ourselves doing a lot of online ordering. That's not a surprise: we're 45km from Emerald (groceries and basics), 400km from Rockhampton (Bunnings, Officeworks, etc) and over 800km from Brisbane (computer stuff, bookstores, JB Hifi etc). Even weekly groceries sometimes get ordered (a refrigerated truck is very useful in summer here and delivery is cheaper than the petrol to do it myself). Thus the question comes up often: what's our street address. Surprisingly, that actually opens an annoying can of worms.

The government has a database of "official" addresses that is used by government agencies and departments but can also be used by businesses. This is what is referenced if you go to a site that auto-fills an address once you start typing it (though some businesses have their own, sourced from who-knows where). Auto-fill is, if not a bane of my existence, at the least a deep nuisance.

According to it, we live at 1502 Rubyvale-Sapphire Rd, The Gemfields. That is both correct and useless. You see The Gemfields is not a location, it's a locality. Um, what? Well consider what happens if you live outside of a village, town or city. What can you use as an address? That's where localities come in. They cover the large tracts of Australia that don't belong to a population centre, however small. We live in a no man's land between the boundaries of both Rubyvale and Sapphire so we are covered by a larger locality called The Gemfields. It's huge, covering 1182 square km and includes (at the very least) Rubyvale, Sapphire, Anakie and, over 50km away, Willows.

Given its size where precisely should deliveries go? There is no delivery to the door out here except for groceries (GPS finds us then), just a few scattered dropoff points like our local hardware store. Even mail to our street address goes to the nearest post office (where nearest is sometimes construed to be Sapphire - or once Willows - which we don't want). Postcodes don't help (look up "postcode 4702 map" to see why. It's worse than The Gemfields!).

If a site accepts a PO Box that's great but couriers insist on a street address even if they won't actually use it. That brings me back to auto-fill. If I can put in a manual address I use Rubyvale to give them a big hint where to drop the order off. If I can't then I have to get creative. Fortunately I usually find ways to trick a site into letting me adjust the suburb field but they can be quite stubborn about not letting me. IKEA was a real pain, for instance, and I'm still not sure how I managed it. Or why "Rubyvale" had a delivery cost of $9 where "The Gemfields" had $29...

Sometimes (banks) you can't do it at all and have to call them and explain. ING being a case in point after they tried to send a letter to my street address and couldn't so they froze my accounts. I have no idea why they cared given they had a perfectly usable PO Box but I suspect they care about identity details more than most.

That said, I do feel sorry for utilities. Our mining claim (electricity only though some also have landline phone), like others, is in a maze of impermanent unmarked tracks. Finding it to read the meter is not a job for the faint hearted. That's probably why they once estimated the usage. Fair enough, but when we complained (as the estimate was way out) the reader insisted he'd been there. And again one day when Anthony waited up there for him. Lots of to and fro but they ended up accepting our photo of the meter and had words with the (not the usual guy) reader.

Just don't ask us what that street address is:)

Late postscipt: there has been movement on this issue. Apparently I'm not the only one disgruntled and a project has been bubbling along to get the locality issue here addressed. A submission for new localities and adjusted boundaries is now with the Minister. We may end up in Rubyvale yet!