There is a long history of studies showing that where you live matters, particularly for health. In 2011, Cancer Council Queensland released the Atlas of Cancer in Queensland, highlighting how the patterns of cancer diagnosis and survival varied depending on where people lived. This atlas had an important influence on key policy initiatives designed to reduce that geographical variation in Queensland. While there’s information on cancer burden available at national level, prior to the Queensland atlas there was no comprehensive picture of how the cancer burden varied depending on where you lived across Australia.

The Australian Cancer Atlas aims to address that gap. It builds on our previous experience to provide a national perspective of how the burden of cancer varies by geographical area. It does this by expanding the spatial models used to generate the statistics, the methods of visualising the results, and disseminating the atlas through a freely accessible, interactive, online system.

The Australian Cancer Atlas was first launched in September 2018. This was a collaborative study funded by FrontierSI, Cancer Council Queensland, Australian Institute of Health and Welfare and Queensland University of Technology. The atlas had additional support from the Centre for Research Excellence in Prostate Cancer Survivorship. It was endorsed by the Australasian Association of Cancer Registries and Cancer Council Australia, and investigators accessed expertise from the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Mathematical and Statistical Frontiers. A small update to the Atlas was released in February 2021, which included data up to 2016, and one additional cancer type – classic myeloproliferative neoplasms (MPN).

In March 2021, work started on the Australian Cancer Atlas 2.0. This represented a large expansion on the original atlas, including more cancer types, a greater range of indicators, and, for the first time, information on how the geographical patterns have changed over time. The Australian Cancer Atlas 2.0 is a collaboration between Cancer Council Queensland and Queensland University of Technology, with additional funding received from an Australian Research Council Linkage Project Grant.