VPRS 19162 Registrar-General's Office Search Clerk Plans

Full description

This series consists of a cadastral maps used to show application numbers for the conversion of General Law land deeds into Torrens system titles.

The first land tenure system to be introduced into Victoria in March 1838 was called the 'General Law' or 'Old Law System', or more commonly called today, NUA (Not Under Act). Land under the Torrens system (Real Property Act 1862) was therefore 'under Act'. This system was directly based on the principles of the English Common Law.

Under the General Law system, land ownership was based on a set of deeds, being the original deed held by the owner and a Memorial which was generally registered at the RGO. These documents helped prove ownership back to the Crown Grant, although there was no compulsion under this system to register the Memorial with the RGO.

Title was proven by producing the collection of deeds, which was commonly called the ‘Chain of Title’ held by successive owners, as well as a search of the Memorials lodged at the RGO. A Memorial is a copy of the original deed. Every time land changed hands, the chain of deeds needed to be produced and a new deed/Memorial needed to be drawn up by lawyers. It was a cumbersome and expensive system, in which the risk of deeds being lost or destroyed was high. Land ownership in the General Law system was and is still not guaranteed by the Victorian government.

The maps in this series were primarily created to identify active conversion areas, which were most commonly metropolitan areas. The maps were created by the Registrar Generals’ Office (RGO) to track and identify the application numbers for General Law conversion applications in the area depicted on the map. An application number was allocated to each parcel of land when the owner applied to have it converted from the original General Law deed into a title under the new Torrens system. This number was used in several General Law land ownership series, and is identified by the prefix AP, e.g. AP12345. The application number was unique to each application and can be used to track records about a particular parcel of land and its conversion to a title over multiple series. 

The introduction of the Torrens system in Victoria on 2 October 1862, made legislative provisions under the Transfer of Land Act for owners of General Law land to voluntarily convert their land to the Torrens system of land ownership. Although the expectation was that all land would be brought under the operation of the Transfer of Land Act fairly quickly, this did not prove to be the case. In the mid-1980s, after 120 years of operation of the Torrens system, large areas of land remained under the General Law system. The registration of Memorials continued until the 31 December 1998 when the register was closed. This was an effort to help speed up the Conversion process, as all new land transactions would have to be conducted under the Transfer of Land Act following an application to convert the deed into a certificate of title.

Most marketable parcels of land under the General law ownership have now been converted to the Torrens system.