What an interesting link, and not just for the vehicles. It covers a whole period in history too.
The original survey of Australia was done by ground triangulation from a baseline on Mornington Peninsula. I don't have the era handy.
Look back today on the surveyors of the mid 1800s who created national resources (railways and the overland telegraph, and plotting mineral deposits) from manual instruments carried on horses & camels, and who spent their nights in tents under hurricane lanterns doing the calculations and plotting manually.
Aerial surveying came into use from about the 1930s.
My memory is of the survey ship Warrego. When I was living on Magnetic Island (1956), it came by, and the survey party climbed through rugged tropical scrub to the high point of the island to erect a trig point, then bashed back to the boat. The trig point was obscured. They had to bash back up again and reposition it.
Highways tended more to be formalising of bush tracks established by pioneering farmers. That shows clearly in the various threads on the evolution of Hume Hwy.
Into a later era, land surveying was a skill which Australia exported, and didn't just privatise to an overseas operator. Australia has done a lot of mapping for New Guinea and for Indonesia, all by air. Processing of such data requires a lot of sophisticated mathematics, and the advent of high-powered computing has been an important step forwards. I have studied a lot of the relevant mathematics, but never did have to teach it. In one of my overseas holidays, I visited the museum on the equator in Ecuador. It covers the importance of the area in the 1600s, when surveyors used a baseline there to compare with one in northern Scandinavia to establish that Earth isn't spherical (it is an oblate spheroid). Later in the same holiday I was in Greenwich (London, UK), covering surveying from a century later. Captain Cook came south to test a new chronometer, helping navigators establish longitude. Claiming Australia for the British crown was only part of the project.
Today, when you have your gps tell you where to turn next, the mathematics behind the automation was established by these people; the mathematics behind the positioning and speed calculations from signals bounced off geostatic satellites is essentially the same as the mathematics used by surveyors centuries and decades ago.
One of the aspects of the HCVC forum which I enjoy is the diversity: it covers far more than just the vehicles. People and applications are just as important. Vehicles are only a means to an end; they are not an end in themselves.
Roderick B Smith
Rail News Victoria Editor
