One of the interesting changes in the NSW redistribution proposal was the decisive shift of Hume towards Sydney.
Looking at the proposed boundaries for the seat, I realised that they look quite similar to the boundaries of a seat that I was familiar with almost 20 years ago, but with a different name.
Hume has now largely replaced the area that Macarthur covered less than twenty years ago. So for this post I wanted to look at the history of how Hume and Werriwa, both federation seats, have moved from rural NSW into the city.
My mapping files date back to the 2007 election (although for some states cover back to 2001), but the Parliamentary Library has a great website which allows you to look up any electorate that has existed since 1901 and see every version of that seat’s boundaries up to 2022. I’ve also used that site to make some static maps.
The seat of Hume is a Federation electorate, but the original boundaries covered Albury, Tumut, Gundagai and Cootamundra, wrapping around but not covering Wagga Wagga.
Hume lost Albury in 1949, but didn’t take in Goulburn until 1992.
Hume has steadily moved north since then. The 2000 redistribution expanded the seat until it almost reached the Camden area, and the 2006 redistribution pushed it back to just contain a small part of the Wollondilly area.
The 2009 redistribution draw Hume with the big hole in the Southern Highlands for the first time, but finally in 2016, Hume took in suburbs that were clearly part of the Sydney urban area for the first time.
This map shows the 1901, 1984-1992 and 2016-2022 boundaries – they were already very different before the new proposed boundaries. I have then roughly drawn in the 2025 proposed boundaries in red.
So I decided to make a map comparing the Macarthur of 2007 to the proposed Hume of 2025. And while we’re at it, I’m also comparing the Werriwa of 2007 to the proposed Macarthur of 2025.
My memory had been that Macarthur in 2007 was mostly a seat covering the Camden and Wollondilly councils, while Werriwa covered safer Labor areas in Campbelltown. This sounds very similar to Hume and Macarthur today. The map shows that it’s a tiny bit more complicated, but it mostly lines up quite well.
Macarthur in 2007 did cover a few suburbs at the southern end of Campbelltown City that are now in the more urban Macarthur of 2025. The Werriwa of 2007 did stretch a bit further north than the Macarthur of 2025, but there was a substantial overlap.
The comparison applies much more clearly one seat further out.
There is a large part of Wollondilly Shire with no residential population, and that area wasn’t in the Macarthur of 2007, but most of the populated area was in Macarthur. The only exceptions were Tahmoor and Bargo. At the other end, Hume of 2025 now covers almost all of the Camden Council area, with the exception of the new suburbs of Gregory Hills, Gledswood Hills and Currans Hill.
This story is primarily about the shifting position of Hume, and how it has largely replaced Macarthur as the outermost seat in south-western Sydney, but it is following a path trod last century by Werriwa.
The seat of Werriwa is named after the Aboriginal name for Lake George. The original Werriwa in 1901 covered Goulburn, Yass, Harden and what would eventually become the northern half of Canberra.
By 1913, Werriwa was starting to approach Sydney, and by 1922 it covered Campbelltown, Camden and the Sutherland Shire, while still stretching out to Boorowa.
The 1949 redistribution turned Werriwa into an outer-Sydney electorate, covering Liverpool, the Shire and not much else. That was the seat that Gough Whitlam won in a by-election in 1952. Whitlam’s seat then lost Sutherland in 1955 and stretched up to Parramatta, and by the time Whitlam was Prime Minister it had settled into the south-west.
This final map compares the 2016-2022 version of Werriwa to the 1901 version.
