NRS-13889 | Surveyors' field books [Surveyor General]

Full description

This series consists of field books from the Surveyor-General's Department.

Crown Plans have been produced since 1788 to define roads, leases, licences and grants affecting Crown Land or land in the process of being alienated from the Crown to ensure its orderly management and administration. Field Books were created to facilitate the taking of notes by surveyors on site to gather sufficient information to allow for the drawing up of Crown Plans.

The Surveyor-General's Department requested certain field books to be lodged with the Department by Licensed and Registered surveyors. These surveyors could be employed by the Surveyor-General and Department of Lands or in private practice. Licensed and Registered surveyors could be instructed by the Surveyor-General to survey specific areas, these became the controlled surveys in these 'Ordinary' Field books, which provided additional information or updated earlier plans.

The Field Books represent the primary record of survey and were required to be submitted to the Surveyor-General on the completion of the survey or on demand.

Field books contain the following information:
instruction number;
class and purpose of survey;
portion or allotment and section number; parish and county; municipality or shire; city, town or village;
a diagram to illustrate the survey sufficiently to facilitate the preparation of a complete and accurate plan without recourse to any other records and without verbal explanation;
particulars such as physical character, geological formation, types of soil, variety and density of timber, grazing and agricultural capabilities and water supply
the position of improvements; particulars of ownership; description and value; names of estates, houses, roads, streets, lanes, rivers, creeks, lakes;
the datum line of the survey and the azimuth adopted; bearings in degrees, minutes and seconds of arc, including repetition of angles and closing angles;
lengths as measured, corrections for slope and temperature and lengths deduced;
references from reference trees or other reference marks;
on measured lines the intersections of watercourses, other natural features, fences, etc;
the position and state of preservation of old marks;
lines rechained;
offset distances and widths of frontage watercourses;
details of astronomical observations set out in detail in field notes and a schedule of reduced observations.

The series is arranged numerically by field book number. Each number features the prefix "O". The early field books in the series only had a number issued, the "O" prefix was added later for administrative purposes. Field books with an "O" prefix stopped being issued in 1925 however "O" prefix books continued to be used until the survey of an area or the book was completed and a new book needed.

Field Book 1, Surveyor Charles Grimes, Surveys of portions and grants - counties Cumberland and Cook, is the earliest in the series and is dated 1794.