As we all know, technology has made our lives a lot easier but we didn’t always have lasers or GPS. What did we do before these things?
In a post last year I talked about my new skill of old law title searching. Someone who read the post commented to me that process and “system” sounded like blockchain. In fact, it is one of the earliest forms of blockchain. Not everything is new! Anyway, I closed that post promising to shed some light on how we figured out where the boundaries of property were and here it is.
Since 1788 in and around Sydney and then 1837 onwards in Victoria, land was surveyed and alienated from the crown – i.e. sold off usually, but not always, at public auction. In Victoria, this process commenced in Melbourne where the first sale took place in July 1837. Following this the entire state – post the 1851 separation from NSW (a topic for another day) – was divided up.
Today, the cadastral pattern of Victoria embraces 37 counties, 2005 parishes, and 908 townships. Of these, 89 parishes and four townships do not have plans as there have not yet been any Crown subdivision surveys to justify the preparation of a plan. These are mostly located in Gippsland, north-east Victoria, and the Big Desert area.
It’s these same counties and parishes that you’ll still see on your land title today. To see it laid out on huge plans is quite amazing and was an onerous and time consuming task to put it together especially to survey it the first time.
But having surveyed it, they needed some permanent way to know how to figure out where the precise boundaries were. In order to do this a permanent set of survey marks was established. These survey marks were, and still are, essential to making the whole thing work. The Government has made a considerable investment in placing, coordinating and maintaining these marks. Their existence and the benefit of them, however, is barely known.
Survey marks, apart from the traditional wooden peg, have taken a variety of forms over the years. Examples:
plough marks in the ground
blazed trees
arrowheads cut in rock
plaques and tablets, cast in various metals and set in concrete
Standard Survey Marks
metal tubing
metal pipes and rods set in concrete or driven in the ground
high tensile drive nails
other nails, spikes, rivets and short lengths of metal pipe or rod
chisel cuts in concrete structures
Many of the marks have protective covers – some in the form of concrete and some in metal and some have indicator or guard posts nearby. Some have stone cairns above or near them and some have beacons, like one on Corio Bay near Geelong that is located below a shipping beacon for the bay.
And the best part of all of this is that they are still out there if you know where to look, and yes I like to go looking for them – a low tech version of geo-caching.
I’ve been collecting some examples over the past few years – trying to see how many different ones that I can find. I have plenty of examples of the official permanent survey marks – made from brass, numbered and usually epoxied to the gutter, a concrete block or the footpath. There are plenty of these around and most people would probably walk past at least one of these a week without being aware of it.
Out in the countryside they tend to be a little less formal. I’ve found a nail in a concrete block with a cross marked in the head. Elsewhere many nails in fences and plenty of markers/pointers to where the permanent marker is or, in a number of cases, was. I really have no idea why someone would want to steal the marker including the concrete block it was on. That just helps no one. And, then nearby home here in Geelong, someone spray painted one blue and while it’s made it easy to find it’s not really necessary.
These marks are dispersed over the suburbs and the countryside and they serve as permanent (if they’re there…) reference points for surveyors to calculate and measure precisely where land and title boundaries are. And that’s really the point of the whole exercise. Land title boundaries are set with a reference to another boundary or survey mark and through that we know where boundaries are. In a way, it’s just another blockchain.
So how does one find them? Well you don’t have to walk down the street staring at the footpath, no. There’s an online service these days called the “Survey Marks Enquiry Service” accessed through a State Government website / application known as “Lassi - Spear.” Each marker has a reference document that details how and where to find what you’re looking for.
So next time you buy or sell or do something with your property you can rest assured that someone figured out a long time ago how to be sure where your fence should go!
Until next time, have fun out there.
Chris