Geocoding Australian Postcodes

A recent project has required the latitude and longitude and geographical coordinates of all of the Australian postcodes. This data doesn't seem to be freely available anywhere, however the Australian Post office maintains a csv file of all the postcodes and make it available from Auspost.com.au in the form of the Postcode Datafile.

We took this, put it in a database and looped over it using Googles geocoding service to lookup a coordinate for each and every entry - that's 16,079 to you and me.

Of all these 16079 Google couldn't get a result for 647 of them, mostly I believe because they are post office sorting offices or PO boxes that dont necessarily relate to a geographical address. There were also a few erroneous entries, that ended up in Europe, so these have been removed from the final version.

We managed to get through it in 2 days, mostly because we sent no more than 1 request per second to Google so we wouldn't get blocked.

Attached is a zip with the kml file for Google Earth (this is REALLY cool) and a csv file with the data in.