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'Average' Aussie is a 37yo mum of two

By Stephanie Smail
A mother and her two children.

The average Australian is a 37-year-old mother of two who lives in the suburbs.

stock.xchng: hortongrou

The average Australian is a 37-year-old mother living in the suburbs, according to data released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS).

She also has two children and works as a sales assistant, which the 2011 census said was the most common job for the average Australian.

Myles Burleigh from the ABS said it was a profile that had changed dramatically over the past 100 years.

He says the average Australian in the early to mid 1900s was a 20-something man, until women started outnumbering men in 1979.

"What we're seeing is the average Australian has gotten a lot older [and] also nowadays we've got more women than men, whereas back then we had more men than women," Mr Burleigh said.

But he says that average could fluctuate in states and territories where men still outnumber women.

"In Western Australia and the Northern Territory, for example, they've got more men than women so the average Australian was a man in those states," he said.

"Some states are a little bit younger. For example the average person in the [Northern Territory] is 31, compared to the average Australian who's 37."

The director of the Australian Demographic and Social Research Institute Professor, Peter McDonald, says the change could be explained by Australia's migration history.

He also says that as women live longer, men should get used to being outnumbered.

"If you go back to the years after [World War II], a lot of the migration in the 1950s was heavily male," Professor McDonald said.

"As we come forward in time to today there are still an excess of males in migration.

Brisbane mother Joanna, 37, epitomises the ABS's average Australian.

She has a university degree in marketing but is working part-time as a sales assistant while her children are young.

"I wasn't able to go full-time because of child commitments," she said.

"I'm the primary carer while dad's off doing full-time work so it was a perfect round hole for me to step right into because when your kids are sick I can call in sick, and it's not the end of the world.

"I can swap shifts, it's a little bit flexible [and the work is] not too serious where it's taking up too much of my time."

Joanna also lives in the inner city suburb of Clayfield - a common choice for women her age with a family - and she says public transport makes it desirable.

"I consider myself still relatively quite young," she said.

"I like to get out, go to a bar, go to a club, so it's handy, you don't have a very long and expensive cab ride home.

"[It's good] just knowing that the cabs run frequently and the trains run frequently."

It was the first time the ABS had been able to pinpoint the average Australian.

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