This has been bugging me for years and I can’t figure it out. There are lots of Australian “Places” that have “Bal” as part of the name and I would love to know what it means.
Examples:
https://www.inaturalist.org/places/richmond-valley-bal
https://www.inaturalist.org/places/gr-dandenong-bal
https://www.inaturalist.org/places/noosa-bal
https://www.inaturalist.org/places/armidale-dumaresq-bal
Can anyone put me out of my misery?
I’m in Australia and I have no idea.
The only references I can find online are to Australian Bureau of Statistics zones, but I can’t find what they stand for. Perhaps they were ingested from there or a similar source?
all of them are standard places, so they would have been ingested from GADM
and indeed if I go to GADM, this is definitely where they’re from, see eg the subdivisions for Victoria: https://gadm.org/maps/AUS/victoria_2.html
but I can’t find any explanation of what it means
hmm unsure; the Dandenong one listed by OP is an area of Melbourne, definitely an urban/suburban area and not rural
Bushfire attack level, probably.
https://cobaltconstructions.com.au/bushfire-attack-levels/
‘Bal’ is an abbreaviation of ‘Balance’. For example, the Local Government Area (LGA) of Southern Grampions in Victoria, has been split into three Statistical Local Areas (SLAs).
These are named:
In this system, ‘Hamilton’ is equivalent to the city of Hamilton, ‘Wannon’ is in the west of the LGA, and ‘Bal’ (referring to ‘Balance’) covers the east of the LGA.
Thank you so much! It was not something I was ever going to figure out, but it makes sense once you know.
Yes, to me that is what “BAL” means, but it is nothing to do with large areas, it affects individual homes. So when my house was built it had to have particular features because of the BAL zone it is in, but houses less than 1km away have different Bushfire Attack Levels because they are not surrounded by eucalyptus trees like I am, they are in open pasture.
