#nothing wrong with petersham!

[a-suspicious-lack-of-bagel]

something I've recently remembered:

NSW still has counties and parishes! while they sometimes show up on property titles, survey maps etc. their main remaining purpose is to specify what part of the state follows SA time (Yancowinna county, including Broken Hill) and sometimes also SA industrial relations laws (also Yancowinna).

what DOES bother me, however, is that the administrative parish names don't seem to like up with anything?

For instance, take the Parish of Petersham. The important post towns are Summer Hill and Leichhardt. The railway stations (originally) were Ashfield and Newtown. To be fair, All Saints Petersham is pretty old, but not as old as the administrative divisions; and St Johns Ashfield has the more important parish and the older church. The only thing Petersham has going for it is that it's roughly in the centre of the cadastral parish - but SURELY they could have moved it over and made Ashfield the centre?

To be fair to Governor Brisbane it wasn't much of a suburb in 1825 but come the 1850s it was vibin and in the 1870s it seems to have been The Place To Be. But hey, I can't exactly complain - the Brits have done FAR worse things arbitrarily drawing lines on maps. I do just wish they'd tweaked the divisions for Federation to actually line up with places of significance.