Bendigo, Victoria

Bendigo is located in the Bendigo Valley approximately 150 kilometres north-west of Melbourne. It is a major centre of financial services, healthcare services, and manufacturing.

This report presents a community profile of Bendigo and surrounding communities using data developed from ABS Census for Breaking Down Barriers Shared Data Environment (BDB-SDE).

For our analysis, Bendigo refers to the city of Bendigo (not to be confused with the Greater City of Bendigo), and seven surrounding communities: California Gully – Eaglehawk, East Bendigo – Kennington, Flora Hill – Spring Gully, Kangaroo Flat – Golden Square, Maiden Gully, Strathfieldsaye, and White Hills – Ascot.

Bendigo Map

Key characteristics of Bendigo

  • Unemployment in Bendigo in 2021 was 2.6 percent which is slightly lower than the unemployment in Victoria and Australia (3.1 percent)
  • Population of Bendigo has higher proportion of people who are 65 and older and those who are 19 and younger
  • The share of people in social housing (3.5 percent) is higher in Bendigo than in Victoria or Australia
  • The share of people in extreme poverty is lower than in Victoria or Australia but share of people who are in non-extreme poverty and near-poverty is higher

The differences in Bendigo communities

  • California Gully – Eaglehawk is community with the highest poverty rate in 2021 (26 percent), while Strathfieldsaye is the community with the lowest poverty rate
  • Strathfieldsaye and Maiden Gully are the communities with the largest population of people 19 and younger, while California Gully – Eaglehawk is the community with the largest share of those 65 and older
  • Flora Hill – Spring Gully is a community with the highest share of people who have Bachelor’s degree and higher

How has Bendigo changed?

  • The share of people with at least a Bachelor degree keeps increasing reaching 25 percent of population aged 20-64 in 2021
  • The share of people in public housing went down from 5 percent to 3.5 percent
  • The share of those not in labour force increase dramatically from 20 percent to 35 percent
  • The share of people in extreme poverty remained stable (about 3 percent), the share of people in non-extreme poverty went down from 11 percent to 7 percent, and the share of people in near-poverty was volatile, going down by 2016 and bouncing back in 2021

© 2020-2022, Melbourne Institute: Applied Economic & Social Research, The University of Melbourne. Interactive visualisations developed by Melbourne Institute Data & Analytics.