Another Challenge

 In the past we had a challenge of visiting every town in NSW.  This was pretty much to give us a focus for trips in our camper, and when the camper was burnt in the February 2017 Carwoola bushfire we gave that idea away.  We had defined a town as somewhere with a War Memorial, primarily because I found a list of places with War Memorials: in some cases the memorial was all that was left of the 'town'!

We are now doing some exploring of Victoria and I have decided to set up a challenge of visiting every "town" in Victoria.  My starting point for the list is all the State Suburbs listed by the ABS in the output for the 2016 Census: this is 2,931 areas.  Of these 116 have zero population so obviously are not towns!

That still leaves too many places so I took as a benchmark the population of Genoa, a small locality with a pub in the middle of a cluster of houses near Mallacoota: that has a 2016 Census population of 55 people.  Despite the impact of the Black Summer bushfire of December 2019-January 2020 by the 2021 Census the number of residents of Genoa (including some dwellings away from the central cluster) had risen to 66 people.  So my (arbitrary) conclusion is that a Victorian town is a State Suburb with a 2017 population of 50+ people.  That gives a target of 2058 "towns" which is still too high but will do as a starting point.

I have taken another look at the list and find that taking a population criterion of >500 gives a list of 847 Suburbs which seems reasonable.  So I will take that as my basic list.  If somewhere meets a visit criterion (see below) but with lower population I will add it to the list.  Halls Gap is an early entry here.

The next question is what constitutes a visit?  Simply driving through is not enough.  Following on from the NSW exercise, finding and photographing a War Memorial qualifies as a visit.  (I shall see if I can find a list of War Memorials similar to that for NSW: I added quite a few to the NSW list which I think served a useful social purpose.)

I will also add the following activities as constituting a visit:

1. Staying in the area overnight;
2. Visiting a brewery or winery in the area;
3. Purchasing and eating a meat pie baked in the area;
4. Visiting an op-shop;
5. Submitting an eBird checklist (this one needs a little thought).

So stopping in Bruthen en route to Melbourne to buy a pie at the bakery (highly rated) or pick up some beer from the Bullant Brewery (very highly rated) counts as a visit.  

My first step towards this has been to set up an ACCESS data base recording the names of the towns and the way they qualified as visited.  I shall record historic visits as well as those since 2021 but put more detail in those visited in 2022 and onwards.

I will also add in a latitude and longitude for the places visited.