Janine Preston

Edmondson Park carries the name of a genuine Australian hero and the infrastructure to match its rapid growth. It honours Corporal John Hurst Edmondson, who trained at nearby Ingleburn Army Camp and was posthumously awarded Australia’s first Victoria Cross of the Second World War for his bravery at Tobruk in 1941. Built largely on former […]

Riverstone is one of the genuinely old towns of Sydney’s north-west, first settled as a government stock farm in 1803, and it wears that history on its main street even as new estates spread out around it. Lieutenant-Colonel Maurice Charles O’Connell named his 1810 land grant “Riverston” after his birthplace in County Kerry, Ireland, and […]

Marsden Park is the North West Growth Area suburb that got the big-box retail before it got the infrastructure to match, and its story is a genuinely useful case study in how fast Sydney’s fringe can grow. Named after Samuel Marsden, the Church of England clergyman and landowner who shaped much of early colonial Sydney, […]

Schofields has grown faster than almost anywhere else in Sydney over the past two decades, up more than 500 per cent since 2001, and it did it on land that once served as a wartime RAAF airfield. Named after convict-turned-timber-getter John Schofield, who received a 259-hectare grant here in 1857, the suburb built its identity […]

Rouse Hill pulls off a rare combination for a Sydney growth suburb: a fully realised town centre, a Sydney Metro station, and one of the most historically significant colonial estates in the country, all within the same postcode. It takes its name from Richard Rouse, a public servant and free settler who arrived in the […]

Box Hill is one of the fastest-growing suburbs anywhere in Sydney, up a staggering 617.5 per cent between the 2016 and 2021 Censuses, and it is still only partway through its transformation. The name comes from either a stand of box trees once common in the area, or the nineteenth-century hunting boxes wealthy Sydneysiders built […]

Melonba did not exist five years ago, and its census history proves it: zero recorded population in 2016, and a growth rate exceeding 460 per cent since. Carved from the western portion of Marsden Park and formally gazetted on 6 November 2020, Melonba takes its name from a Dharug word for a local species of […]

Tallawong is one of Sydney’s youngest suburbs, and it owes its very existence to a train station. Carved out of parts of Schofields and Rouse Hill and officially gazetted on 7 November 2020, the suburb takes its name from the Dharug word “dalawang”, meaning apple gum tree, a name first given to the metro station […]

The Gables takes its name from a dairy farm, and a particularly picturesque one at that. The suburb sits on land once owned by dairyman Robert Hurrell, whose sizeable holding was split into two parcels known as Blue Gables and Red Gables, names that survive today in Red Gables Road running through the centre of […]

Badgerys Creek is the suburb where the map of Sydney is being redrawn. For two centuries it was quiet farmland on Wianamatta-South Creek, the kind of place named after a settler and then largely forgotten. Then, in 1986, the federal government picked it as the site of Sydney’s second airport, and everything changed. Farms were […]

Bradfield is Australia’s first genuinely new city in more than a century, and it is being built from scratch on what was, until 2021, a stretch of rural land in Bringelly. Gazetted as its own suburb on 31 March 2023, Bradfield takes its name from Dr John Bradfield, the engineer behind the Sydney Harbour Bridge […]

Luddenham is a quiet, semi-agricultural locality yet one of western Sydney’s most strategically significant rural suburbs. It’s a suburb that has now found itself at the epicentre of the Aerotropolis transformation that is reshaping the entire south-western Sydney corridor. Once known primarily for its large land holdings and connection to the colonial Blaxland family, Luddenham […]

Orchard Hills is one of western Sydney’s most strategically positioned semi-rural suburbs, a quiet acreage locality of under 2,000 people that is currently the subject of one of the most significant rezoning proposals in Penrith’s recent planning history. The suburb sits directly on the alignment of the Sydney Metro Western Sydney Airport line, and a […]

Kemps Creek is one of Greater Sydney’s most deliberately semi-rural addresses, a suburb of acreage properties, market gardens, horse paddocks and open farmland that sits at the southern edge of the City of Penrith. Despite its location in a fast-growing region, it still manages to feel a world away from the suburban density of neighbouring […]

Currans Hill is a compact residential suburb in the Camden LGA, sitting about 2.5 kilometres west of Camden town centre and forming part of the broader cluster of family suburbs around Narellan. It is a predominantly owner-occupier suburb built for families, with a strong trades and blue-collar working population, affordable entry-level house prices for the […]

Canley Heights is a densely settled, family-focused suburb in the Fairfield City LGA, positioned between Cabramatta and the Fairfield city centre on the eastern edge of the 2166 postcode. With a population of over 12,300 that grew by 12.3 per cent in a single census period, a median house price of approximately $1,370,000 and annual […]