South Australia's Surveying History

Surveyors Before Colonel Light 

Early surveyors in South Australia were also explorers and planners who ventured into uncharted territory. They mapped the foundations of towns, roads and the capital city of South Australia.

These surveyors included:

• Captain Thyssen, who sailed the Great Australian Bight as far as Ceduna in 1627.
• Admiral D’Entrecasteau visited the same area in 1792.
• Lieutenant James Grant cruised portions of the south east coast in 1800 and named Mount Schank and Mount Gambier.
• Matthew Flinders, who arrived in 1802, named most of the coastal features and mapped coastal waters in considerable detail.
• Nicholas Baudin, who also arrived in 1802, met Matthew Flinders at Encounter Bay.
• Captain Charles Sturt, who discovered the mouth of the Murray in 1830 and stated in 1832 that the plains below the Mount Lofty Ranges would be an ideal site for a settlement.
• Captain Collett Barker discovered the mouth of the Onkaparinga river and named Sturt Creek.

The Wakefield Plan

The Province of South Australia was to be settled according to Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s principles of systematic colonisation. This meant that land would be sold at a fixed minimum price and couldn’t be given away or sold cheaply to anyone.

The money that was raised from the sale of land was used to transport labourers who would work for the landowners for a wage. The labourers were then able to save up enough to buy their own land.

Once enough land had been sold to ensure that the settlement of South Australia was viable, surveying became of critical importance. The Rules of the Disposal of Public Land set by the South Australian Commission, stated that all land must be surveyed, with roads and footpaths marked, and subdivided into sections of 80 acres each. Everything had to be carefully mapped.

The NEW South Australian Colony

Colonel William Light (pictured) was appointed as South Australia’s first Surveyor-General. When he took up the post he was 50 years old and in poor health. His team, consisting of 10 surveyors and 30 labourers, was poorly trained and inadequate for the challenges ahead.

Light sailed from England in the brig Rapid and arrived in Antechamber Bay, Kangaroo Island, on 9 August 1836. His deputy surveyor, General George Strickland Kingston, arrived in October of the same year on board the Cygnet.

In the two months between his own arrival and the scheduled arrival of the first settlers Light was expected to have:
examined all good harbours on 1,500 miles of coast
surveyed the town acres
founded the first town and as many secondary towns as possible
completed a survey of 100,000 country sections.

Port Lincoln was originally inspected and then rejected as the site for the city. After assessing all possible options, Light decided that the plains below the Mount Lofty Ranges would be the site of the new city of Adelaide.

The Surveying Of Adelaide

The first Governor of South Australia, Captain Hindmarsh, arrived along with 170 other passengers on board the Buffalo on 28 December 1836. He tried to persuade Light to build the city closer to the Port River but Light refused as the area was prone to occasional flooding. Light did agree to survey between 200 and 300 acres of land adjacent to the Port River instead.

The first survey station was placed on Newmarket Hill, close to the current intersection of North and West Terrace. It was here that a base line was laid marking the true north-south line. This line established the grid system for roads travelling north-south or east-west, town acres and rural sections. Originally, North Adelaide was parallel to Adelaide but was swung to allow a better fit with the topography of the area.

The pegging of the town proceeded quickly from 1837. Despite many setbacks, including a labourers strike, staff shortages and a total lack of transport, 1,004 town acres and 38 acres of the city were pegged within eight weeks.

An increased demand for land meant that within six months surveyors had to produce a plan for an extra 100,000 acres of land subdivided into 154 and 80-acre sections. Light dispatched his Deputy Surveyor-General Kingston to London to request for more staff and equipment.

Complaints had been made to the Commission in London about the slowness of the surveying and his request for more staff and equipment was refused. Instead, Light was told to change his surveying methodology to one based on speed rather than accuracy. When Light received the instructions he resigned, along with most of his staff, and he established the first private surveying business in South Australia.

By February 183,860,000 acres around Adelaide were ready. In May 1838 a ballot was held to determine the order in which landowners could choose their land.

After Colonel Light

After Light resigned Charles Sturt was appointed Surveyor-General in February 1839 until his replacement, Edward Charles Frome, arrived in September 1839. By 1841 Frome had completed the surveys from the Gulf in the west to the Murray in the east.

The colony faced bankruptcy due to heavy government spending and crop failures in 1840 and the Governor, Colonel George Gawler, was recalled to London and was replaced by George Grey who cut spending. Frome was obliged to take on additional duties, including the management of the Land Titles Office. Despite the cut backs the Great Eastern Road was surveyed and constructed in 1841.

In 1845 Governor Grey was replaced by Frederick Robe. Robe responded to reports of mineral finds by revising the regulations for the sale of land thought to or known to carry minerals. Those lands had to be inspected by a government geologist and a mine surveyor before they could be sold. The task of inspecting the land fell to Deputy Surveyor-General Burr who later became General Superintendent of the Burra Mine.

Frome was heavily criticised in an article published in the South Australian in 1848 and he resigned. He left Adelaide in 1849 after having completed the trigonometrical survey of the settled areas of South Australia.

The Exploration of Rural South Australia

Several attempts to penetrate the Australian interior were made by Edward Eyre in 1839 and 1840. He planned to find overland stock routes to settlements in Western Australia. He travelled along the Flinders Ranges and discovered Lake Torrens which prevented pastoral expansion.

In 1844 surveyor John Darke lead an expedition to find good pasture west of Anxious Bay. Setting out from Port Lincoln he discovered that no valuable land existed beyond the Gawler Ranges.

In 1844 Charles Sturt lead an expedition to find the inland sea he believed existed, even setting off with a boat. Drought conditions forced the expedition to stop for six months at Depot Glen near Milparinka. He decided to change his strategy to travelling fast and light, and most of the men and equipment he had brought were sent back to the River Darling.

Sturt was eventually forced to put aside his plan to find the inland sea when he reached the Sturt Stony Desert which forced him to turn back and return to Adelaide.
 

Border Disputes

In 1839 New South Wales Government surveyor Charles James Tyers established a base station at the mouth of the Glenelg River in the south-east corner of South Australia. There he fixed a mean longitude of 141° 01' 23". This was disputed and recalculated by several people, including mapmaker John Arrowsmith, Commander Owen Stanley and Captain Stokes, who all got different longitudes.

In 1847, after considerable effort to fix the longitude of 141° East, the South Australian/ Victorian border was laid out. Edward Riggs White, a South Australian Government surveyor, met with his New South Wales counterpart, Henry Wade, at the Glenelg River. The aim was to establish the correct boundary and they used the original recalculation of Tyers’ fixing set by Commander Owen Stanley (141° 02' 03"). Due to a flawed methodology they placed the boundary well inside South Australian territory and a re-measurement in 1911 showed the border marks to be 150 chains (approximately three kilometres) inside South Australia.

This loss of territory sparked a legal battle. A High Court judgement handed down in 1911 ruled that Henry Wade’s marks constituted the South Australian boundary. The step in South Australia’s border at the River Murray appears on most maps and is a reminder of the difficulties the early surveyors faced.