[R] Drawing Maps of detailed Australian regions

[Barry Rowlingson]

On Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 10:45 AM, Wang, Kevin (SYD)
<kevinwang at kpmg.com.au> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I'm trying to draw a bubble plot over a map -- where the map shows local government areas (LGA) in Australia (or other structures under the Australian Standard Geographical Classification), but am not sure where I can find the data to plot such maps (e.g. draw the state of Northern Territory but also showing LGA divisions).
>
> Any help will be greatly appreciated, apologies if this is a simple question -- this is the first time I'm trying to draw a map in R :).
>

 A second's googling leads me to an aussie gov site with downloadable
shapefiles:

http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/DetailsPage/1259.0.30.001July%202010?OpenDocument

shapefiles can be read in R using the rgdal package. Get that, get
'sp', get 'maptools' - get mapping!

 Any other problems, head over to the r-sig-geo mailing list!

Barry