Determining how different communities are distributed within a city is essential to understanding the cultural and economic processes which drive community development, identity and urban growth. Segregation between ethnic and racial groups remains a popular and at times sensitive topic within the Australian urban narrative, despite little quantitative work being undertaken to examine the empirical basis of these patterns. A number of segregation indices have been developed which quantify aspects of segregation in urban centres. However, some of these are limited in their utility due to the effect of imposed administrative boundaries, or their inability to be undertaken at multiple spatial resolutions, to determine the potentially scale-dependent patterns of segregation. In this work, I use the recent introduction of a surface based segregation approach to determine the patterns of pairwise spatial segregation between ethnic groups of the 2011 census across Australia’s capital cities. I extend this work by introducing a novel Monte Carlo method to infer the statistical significance of the patterns, and by introducing a means to partition the relevant contribution of each of the ethnic groups towards the pairwise segregation estimates. In doing so, I address two important questions about Australia’s ethno-urban fabric: (1) how spatially segregated are ethnic groups from each other in Australian cities, and (2) do certain ethnic groups display more tightly bound communities within these areas? Answering these questions is central to understanding the potentially unique cultural and identity building processes at play within Australia’s urban milieu.