Editorial

by Jon Fairall

^{400 Years On}

In August, I attended one of the year's great conferences - 400 Years of Mapping Australia, organised by the Mapping Sciences Institute in Darwin.

The conference commemorated the voyage of the Dutch ship, the Dufyken, 400 years ago. She sailed over the edge of the known world to run down the monsoon and finally collide - somewhere south of Nova Guinea at 142 East longitude - with a new coast trending north-south. The ship's captain, Willem Janszoon of the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, made no claim to a new land. His chart shows a gap through which the Portuguese navigator Luis Vaez de Torres would, in time, sail his own vessel.

It's not necessary to get overly sentimental about the VOC or its activities in Australia. They invented modern capitalism, and enshrined as cardinal virtues every cold-hearted barbarism perpetrated by modern corporate buccaneers.

There is a certain piquancy is the fact that so many of their sailors, motivated by the finest calculations of self-interest, sailed right past the world's greatest concentration of economic minerals with their noses firmly in the air.

Perhaps you need to be an Australian to see the joke. It was definitely an Australian moment when a translation, provided by a conference attendeee, Professor Jan de Graeve from Belgium, of Janzoon's own handwriting on his chart of the coast, placed his voyage in 1602 - 404 years ago.

But only a pedant would venture into that swamp, so I make no comment.

Why was the conference so interesting? The conference broadcast no ideas about new applications of spatial data; no interesting technical breakthroughs; nothing about the comings and goings of people or organisations. It was about the past; this magazine is about the future.

In short, it lacked everything that makes a conference worthwhile for a magazine editor, and most other people, I suspect.

And yet… There is a view that says history is not about the past. It's about the present, and how we see the past. It's about how we got to be here. If we can pick out the trends that have guided us so far, perhaps we can predict which way we will go in the future.

At Darwin last month, the trends were all on show. The result was illuminating. Conference organiser Trevor Menzies put together an eclectic bunch of speakers who, one way or another, discussed the evolution of mapping. Their presentations extended from the earliest Eurocentic pre-conceptions about the Great South Land, through to the emergence of modern organisations such as Geoscience Australia.

Dorothy Prescott began proceedings with a presentation on the contribution of the early European explorers. Ted Graham finished with a report on the state of undersea exploration technology that will be used in his forthcoming search for the wreck of HMAS Sydney and her German adversary Kormoran, 200 kilometres off the west coast.

In between were some gems. Ian O'Donnell spoke on the evolution of national mapping. Jon Stirzaker looked at the way that geological mapping has developed. John Manning covered geodesy and Carl McMaster did the same for remote sensing. The importance of private enterprise - particularly the growth of centres of technical excellence in the private sector - was covered by Peter Byrne and Brian O'Neill.

John Brock had a great piece on Mitchell and Dixon (which should have been sub-titled Pride and Prejudice), and Earl James and Bill Kitson excelled in their roles as industrial raconteurs.

Looking at it all afterwards, it struck me that behind all these stories lurks the slow but steady increase in the value of spatial data to the community, matched with oscillating allocations of cash by politicians. The link between the two is the visibility of spatial data.

In the Golden Age of surveying in Australia, as in all the colonies, the role of the surveyor was elevated by his role in land allocation. Surveyors, as a result, were not the least influential members of society, nor the poorest.

The early councils of the great and good in Australia were often interrupted by a surveyor demanding his price for some set-out or other.

But when the dust of settlement and land dispute ended, surveying retreated into the land titling system. It did not go away, nor did its importance diminish, but it disappeared from view, and in the national allocation of cash, out of sight is out of pocket.

This did not change until the Second World War, when it occurred to some astute generals during a luncheon one fine Canberra morn that they had only the haziest idea of what they were supposed to be defending, or where it was.

During and after the war there was a crash expansion of the national mapping effort, but that slowly collapsed under the weight of government indifference, the occasional outbreak of geological interest excepted.

Not even the move to spatial data and the emergence of GIS in the 1980s changed this situation overmuch.

From which viewpoint it occurred to me that probably one of the most important presentations for any industry observer this year was the after-dinner speech by Gary Nairn that closed the conference.

Nairn is the Special Minister of State. One of his roles is the implementation of the government's e-government initiatives. Nairn, an ex-surveyor, confirmed what industry players have known this for years - that spatial data is the glue that can bind together data from many different government departments.

Politicians have discovered it more recently. Be forgiving. This industry is looking at a level of visibility that it has not enjoyed since the first generation of land surveyors. The implications for the future of the profession are immense.

The history conference, you see, was all about the future.

JON FAIRALL is the Editor of Position

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(This page last modified on 21 September 2006)