Macquarie, Australian Capital Territory
Encyclopedia
Macquarie is a suburb of Canberra
Canberra
Canberra is the capital city of Australia. With a population of over 345,000, it is Australia's largest inland city and the eighth-largest city overall. The city is located at the northern end of the Australian Capital Territory , south-west of Sydney, and north-east of Melbourne...

, Australian Capital Territory
Australian Capital Territory
The Australian Capital Territory, often abbreviated ACT, is the capital territory of the Commonwealth of Australia and is the smallest self-governing internal territory...

, Australia
Australia
Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...

. Macquarie was gazetted as a division on 22 June 1967 in recognition of Major-General Lachlan Macquarie
Lachlan Macquarie
Major-General Lachlan Macquarie CB , was a British military officer and colonial administrator. He served as the last autocratic Governor of New South Wales, Australia from 1810 to 1821 and had a leading role in the social, economic and architectural development of the colony...

, a former Governor of New South Wales. Streets in Macquarie are named after contemporaries of Governor Macquarie.

Demographics

On Census night 2006, Macquarie had a population of 2,385 people. The census shows that Macquarie residents have an average age of 35 compared to a Canberra average of 34. The average weekly earnings were $400–$499.

The population of Macquarie is predominantly Australian-born at 71.9% with the second most common birth place being the United Kingdom at 7.2% of the population. Accommodation is predominantly separate houses with a gradual increase in flats, units and apartments since previous census periods. There are a group of streets with public housing adjacent to the Jamison Centre.

Suburb amenities

There is a small shopping centre on Lachlan Street in Macquarie that has the well regarded Kinh Do Vietnamese restaurant and the Macquarie Medical Centre. The shopping centre has had a high turnover of other businesses over the years as it attempts fairly unsuccessfully to compete with the much larger and better known Jamison Centre.

The Jamison Centre is the major shopping centre in Macquarie and has popular outdoor Rotary
Rotary International
Rotary International is an organization of service clubs known as Rotary Clubs located all over the world. The stated purpose of the organization is to bring together business and professional leaders to provide humanitarian service, encourage high ethical standards in all vocations, and help...

 community market every Sunday morning. It contains a number of shops and services, including supermarkets, greengrocer, bakeries, newsagent, banks, medical centre and other facilities.

Adjacent to the Jamison Centre is Big Splash Waterpark, one of Canberra's few public swimming pools and home to Canberra's only outdoor water slide. On the corner of Bindubi Street and Belconnen Way is the Canberra High School established in 1938, with large playing fields between it and the public swimming pool.

Macquarie Primary School on Lachlan Street is a government run school established in 1968 and was the first school in Belconnen.

Like most of Canberra, Macquarie's only scheduled public transport is ACTION buses. Four bus routes run through Macquarie, being bus numbers 10, 705, 749 and 942. As a general rule ACTION bus routes run every 30 to 60 minutes from 7am to 11:30pm.

Geography

Macquarie is located in the inner north Canberra district of Belconnen. It is bordered to the north by Belconnen Way, Bindubi Street to the East, Redfern Street to the south and Coulter Drive to the West.

Geology

Greywacke
Greywacke
Greywacke or Graywacke is a variety of sandstone generally characterized by its hardness, dark color, and poorly sorted angular grains of quartz, feldspar, and small rock fragments or lithic fragments set in a compact, clay-fine matrix. It is a texturally immature sedimentary rock generally found...

 from the Ordovician
Ordovician
The Ordovician is a geologic period and system, the second of six of the Paleozoic Era, and covers the time between 488.3±1.7 to 443.7±1.5 million years ago . It follows the Cambrian Period and is followed by the Silurian Period...

 Pittman Formation forms a band down the east of Macquarie. This has been uplifted on the east side of the Deakin Fault. The fault heads in the north east direction in this suburb, where as the Deakin fault normally heads in the north west direction.
A porphyry
Porphyry (geology)
Porphyry is a variety of igneous rock consisting of large-grained crystals, such as feldspar or quartz, dispersed in a fine-grained feldspathic matrix or groundmass. The larger crystals are called phenocrysts...

 of Green-grey Dacitic intrusive containing large white feldspar
Feldspar
Feldspars are a group of rock-forming tectosilicate minerals which make up as much as 60% of the Earth's crust....

 crystals is found under the Jamison Center.
Green grey rhyodacite
Rhyodacite
Rhyodacite is an extrusive volcanic rock intermediate in composition between dacite and rhyolite. It is the extrusive equivalent of granodiorite. Phenocrysts of sodium rich plagioclase, sanidine, quartz, and biotite or hornblende are typically set in an aphanitic to glassy light to intermediate...

of the Walker Volcanics underlie the center and west of Macquarie.

Footnotes

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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