On Monday, the ABS released their latest installment of data on marriages and divorces in Australia .
There’s quite a bit of info in the series that’s worth exploring, but one of the more quirky pieces of data surrounds the occurrence of marriage throughout the year. We can break that down into the proportion of marriages that occur in each State, by month, and see how different patterns play out across the country and which appear to be primarily driven by weather.(click to expand)
Spring and autumn weddings are preferred everywhere across Australia, except for the NT where winter is the marriage season. Qld prefers the winter ends of Spring and Autumn while Tassie has higher rates in the summer ends of those two seasons.
Our marriage seasons are also changing slightly over time– if we compare the national rate of 2008 above with the rates we witnessed in 1989:
….we find that we’re having a slightly lower proportion of marriages in winter while experiencing significantly higher rates of marriage in October and November compared to 20 years ago.
The median age at which we are getting married is increasing, as is the median age at which we have experiencing divorce and separation.
Not only are we getting married at an older age, but our marriages over the last 20 years are actually increasing in length, while our divorce rate (measured in the number of divorces per 1000 population) has remained relatively stable.
Also worth noting is how the proportion of all divorces involving children has been slowly decreasing over time while the average number of children per divorce has been stable.
If we break down the 2008 figures on the median length of marriage to divorce, by State, a good bit of variation gets thrown up.
Which brings us to the quirkiest bit of the data. If we run a scatter plot of the median length of marriage to divorce against the population size of each state, we end up with this:
The smaller the State population (we’re excluding the Territories), the longer the median length of a marriage. So, if you like your spouse and wouldn’t mind staying married to them for as long as possible, I suggest you pack up and move to Tassie. 
11 Comments
Love the marriage distribution by state graph. We got married in NSW in winter, we’re so cool.
Slightly OT, ever seen the spread of birthdays across the year? I’ve heard people say things like ‘lots of birthdays around september’ and would love some actual detail.
It’s weird that NT gets broken out seperately, but the larger population ACT gets lumped in with NSW (presumably).
ACT was separate as well, but the numbers were small and it was the same as Victoria and NSW – so I took it out as it was clogging things up a bit in the charts.
Just shows that NSW has more tempting people…
Is the metric of divorces/1000 people really useful? Aren’t we more interested in divorces as a proportion of marriages in a given year?
Glad to see that ACT was rolled into NSW. For a long while, it’s less restrictive divorce laws had NSW residents rolling in to get their divorces there. At one stage, from memory, the raw statistics showed one divorce for every three marriages, every year.
Alister – it’s called the Crude Divorce Rate. A divorce rate as a proportion of all marriages at a given time is available, but only for years when the Census is undertaken.
2 Tanners, the ACT wasnt rolled in, I just left it out because it’s small and the same as Victoria and NSW.
It’s interesting that the median age difference at marriage is 2.4 years and 2.7 years at separation. Does this mean that women become younger as soon as they separate?
GG
I would think it indicates that the bigger the age difference between partners, the more likely they are to divorce.
Possum, why is the data unavailable? Given that both marriages and divorces need to be registered, surely we’ve got a pretty good idea of the proportion of divorces compared with marriages? I guess I can’t see what the point of the Crude Divorce Rate is if it can’t take into account the number of married people. If the rate of marriages fell, but the proportion of married people who divorced also fell, then the Crude Divorce Rate would also fall, even though nothing interesting is actually happening.