A newly acquired “skill” of mine is title searching. Now, I will be the first to admit that it’s a pretty obscure and low demand skill but it is very important. While most of what I am going to talk about here relates to Victoria, the exact same process works in the rest of the states of Australia because it all follows the British system.
Most people think that their house, well really the land that the house sits on, has a title. Well, not always. For example, my house in Geelong has technically only had a title since 2008. How can that be you ask? It’s because of the way that the whole land system in this country evolved.
To start with the first sales of land in Victoria only started in Melbourne in 1837 and Geelong the year after. As you get out of those two cities we’re talking much later still. The Crown, then the British Imperial Government, surveyed and created lots that were then auctioned off at public auctions. Unlike Tasmania (Van Diemen’s Land then) and Sydney, Victoria did not have free grants of land. Land was not “given” to settlers here like it was elsewhere, it was purchased. There are some exceptions to the rule but they are just that exceptions.
The State of Victoria, just like the others was carved up into a series of Counties. The Counties were then divided into Parishes. Then the parishes were divided into sections and then allotments. So for example, my part of Newtown in Geelong is in the County of Grant (most of Geelong is) and the parish of Moorpanyal. Then we are in what was known as allotment 7 in Section 8. Below that we get down to, in some cases, lot numbers. And while if you go and get your title out you wont find the last bit you will definitely still find the County and the Parish. Incidentally, it’s these Counties and their boundaries that comprised the first electoral boundaries in Victoria in 1851. To date, they still work the same way but they get moved all the time as population changes, some of the names remain.
The Torrens Title system did not come in to being in Victoria until 1862. It was this system and Act that brought in the creation of titles and the Volume (Vol.) and Folios (Fol.) that we now use to define land parcels. Like any pure reference system, there is no logic to the numbers, next in line gets the next number, regardless of where it is in the State. Prior to this transfers of land were effected by memorials. The memorials, which still exist today safely in the care of the State, are absolutely fascinating. All laboriously hand written on vellum or waxed paper they record transactions of all sorts – sales, mortgages, leases, etc. Once the Torrens system came in these were phased out but it took quite some time because at first Torrens titles were not mandated. It took a number of pieces of legislation to get that in place.
While titles are now mandatory, there are still quite a number of pieces of land in Victoria that do not have a title. That’s where title searching comes in. As these old pieces of land are transacted on – sold, mortgaged, leased, transferred they must now get a Torrens title. The old world ways of memorials and paper records are gone, it’s all electronic and I’m sorry to say that most of us will never see the title to our land because, well it’s virtual. The good old digital age!
So, to get a Torrens title, and if you want to do anything with your land and house (or farm etc.) you need one, you need to establish the “chain of title.” To do this you need to establish every owner of the land from the first one through to the current day. Now that might sound simple but I have seen some that take 20 pages because if you figure, like mine that the first owner bought 25 acres in 1839, that was subdivided into say 80 – 100 lots, re-consolidated, subdivided again … you get the picture.
All of the first sales of land in Victoria are recorded permanently on the parish plans or maps of Victoria. That first owner’s name is recorded along with the size of the land, in the imperial system of acres, roods and perches – way before the metric system. If the land was bought at public auction and a lot of the first land was, then the details of the sale were captured in The Government Gazette. I covered the GG a couple of months back in an earlier blog. If it was bought other than at auction, then there exists a land selection file and the details of that are also recorded on the maps.
There are two types of maps. The first is the permanent map. This is an unchanging record of the first owner and the details. It is never touched and sits there. The other is the current map and these are absolute crackers. These maps, and due to the way things worked there were regularly more than one (one in Melbourne and one in the district) which were supposed to be kept identical but regularly weren’t, have got all sorts of things drawn on them. They record Crown Lands, changes in Crown Lands, leases, railways, power lines, townships, high water marks, roads - you name it, it’s on there. Technically, they aren’t used any more (yep, we’ve gone digital) but a few years back they were all digitised and the Public Records Office of Victoria (PROV) have put them all on line. NSW and Tasmania have done the same.
So we have the parish maps, two sorts that record the details. But when each piece of land was sold it also had a “grant.” Now for those paying attention I said there were no Grants in Victoria, that is true, except in the terminology. The first Grants were in what is known as “Fee Simple.” They “Granted” the title from the Crown to an individual, individuals, association or company. A piece of paper was produced – known as the Grant. And these are the starting point for every single old law or common law or general law search (yep 3 different names are used) that takes place.
Some of these grants are pretty boring. But some are simply fantastic. Recently I was helping a friend with researching their country property and came across one of these. “Granted” by Edward the VII it is amazing, the first and only one like it I have seen. The other really interesting thing about titles is that every piece of land has a “first” title, i.e. once it was brought under the Lands Act (which varies depending on timing) a title was issued. Nowadays they are very boring typed pieces of paper with an equally boring CAD diagram with GPS and survey marker references. But not some of the first ones. They are colorful and very enlightening.
So if you’ve got a title on your house, and most of you will, sorry to say that it’s probably a boring piece of paper that most of us don’t even see any more. But it wasn’t always that way!
Next time I’m going to write about how we know which piece of land is which, because we haven’t always had GPS!!!
Have fun out there.
CG