Sources and Problems

f INTRODUCTION THE CONVENTIONS OF MAP MAKING; SOURCES AND PROBLEMS 'To some men it is an extraordinary delight to study, to looke upon a geographical map and to behold, as it were, all the remote Provinces, Towns, and Citties of the world... what greater pleasure can there be then...To peruse those books of Citties.1 Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy. 1621. 'When he can Write well and quick, I think it may be convenient not only to continue the exercise in his Hand in Writing, but also to improve the use of it farther in Drawing, a thing very useful to a Gentleman in several occasions, but especially if he travel, as that which helps a Man often to express, in a few Lines well put together, what a whole sheet of Paper in Writing would not be able to represent and make intelligible.1 John Locke, Thoughts concerning Education. 1693 This thesis is a study of the town plans that evolved from the time Australia was settled by Europeans in 1788 up to the 1840s, when the process of plan making in New South Wales had become codified and predictable and able to be applied to other states when they too were settled by Great Britain. This process was not straight-forward. Local conditions had an influence on the way the plans were constructed. The interior of Australia was unknown when the first town was settled, the continent was a vast land mass without maps. The maps were constructed in such a way and at such particular times to allow for the controlled spread of settlement, and for the settlers to arrive at a sense of cohesion. Within the larger county units the town plans were measured and marked out on the ground; these plans became a most important factor in the great enterprise of migration, giving form to the settlement process itself. The towns and the roads that linked them together provided the backbone of the colony in spatial terms. They were part of a totally different system of measurement and thinking from that used before by the Aborigines, one that had roots deep in western antiquity. Apart from the plan of Sydney, the town plans were usually made before the town started to assemble. In the way of plans they were then used as predictable guides to the future. They had a long history behind them. They stretched from ancient European and Asian civilizations, and along the way, had been modified, abandoned, lost, and re-worked. 2 The, .CgjnY.en.ti.ons .of JfoBrmaK inq As the thesis is constructed around the maps and town- plans, using them as direct evidence, a general background of the tradition of making town plans is first examined here. The earliest ground plans of towns known come from Mesopotamia, surviving as fragments of clay tablets on which the plans are incised, dated from the 4th century BC. Even before this, the Egyptians planned and built monolithic cities, indicating a complex alignment between their observation of the stars and their aspirations for the built environment to echo it on earth. In central Turkey, a wall painting shows in stylised form the houses and the main thoroughfare of the town, dated to 6200 BC (1). The deliberately right-angled and orderly form of Greek cities such as Megalopolis indicates that urban surveying was one of the skills related to the flowering of the arts of architecture and sculpture in the Greek culture. Derived from Greek forms, Roman town planning was exported wherever the Roman army went, and Rome became the centre of a vast network of urban foundations throughout her Empire. The 'agrimensores1 or land surveyors were trained especially for this task. (2) (Figs.0.1 (a-c)). At the Australian Museum, Sydney, in January 1995, a funerary marble relief from Pompeii was exhibited depicting the Roman surveyor's tools of trade: his 'groma' or principal surveying instrument, with its plumb lines, measuring sticks and poles of alignment. These tools were used for dividing arable land and especially for planning and marking out new urban centers. (Fig.0.1 (d)) Other practices related to the founding and delimiting of towns used by ancient surveyors are discussed in Chapter Three, and linked with the founding ceremony of Sydney. There were also echoes of these practices in varying degrees in other Australian city foundations. The Re-emergence of Surveying With the decline of the Roman Empire, the techniques of the 'agrimensores' were lost, and measured town plans did not re-emerge until the Middle Ages in Europe. However, copies of the treatises of the Roman surveyors were made, the Corpus Aqrimensorum was one; and unsealed 'picture maps' were drawn in which town walls and buildings were depicted on simplified ground plans.(3) Views of European cities began to appear as backgrounds to paintings, and in manuscript miniatures, and then woodcut prospects were printed for book illustrations in the 15th century. In Renaissance Italy, Brunelleschi advanced the science of perspective from 1425, and Leon Battista Alberti 5 followed with his Four Books of Architecture which among other things, influenced the development of the 'birds- eye 1 view as a means of depicting cities. Its application to military manoeuvres was evident, and the military surveyors produced the first scale maps of towns to be made since Roman times. By the sixteenth century Italian scholars were writing about the 'new' practices of levelling and determining distances. One of them was the Venetian Silvio Belli, who published his Libra del misurar con la vista, in 1565. He wrote about the use of the compass, cross-staff, quandrant, and astrolobe by the surveyors, who were starting to form a new professional body with members formally qualified.(4)(Fig.0.1 (e)) Their work became known in England where the practical 1landmeaters1 or surveyors studied the books of Edward Worsop, Robert Record, John Dee and Leonard and Thomas Digges.(5) In late Renaissance Italy the mathematical science of geometry, based on the revival of Euclid's theories, led to the publication of a large number of mathematical and geometric texts in the sixteenth century. Geometry was fundamental to the practical activities of cartography, land surveying, civil engineering and architecture, and these pursuits began to flourish in the Italian city- states, and filtered through to England in translations. It was also at the heart of a widely accepted neo- platonic cosmology which found expression in the art of the period. Cartographers like Cristoforo Sorte of Venice were consulted for their skill at designing hydrological systems used for the draining of the Venetian hinterland, and also for their skill at the perspective arrangement of painted landscapes. The compass, the cross-staff, the quadrant, and the astrolabe were their tools of trade. Denis Cosgrove has pointed out that for Renaissance Italy, a key to the unity of material and cultural change lies in the blossoming of the practical art of surveying and map-making allied with the speculative, philosophical culture evident in the surveyors art.(6) In Australian studies, also, the maps and plans of towns may provide useful links in the understanding of how material and cultural change came so quickly, and changed the face of the country within a few generations. In 1572, the great Civitas Orbis Terrarum. a collection of maps in uniform style was produced by the German cartographers George Braun and Frans Hogenberg. This started a fashion for 'town books' in the 17th and 18th century, but manuscript maps continued to be made for particular purposes. In England, one of the first published maps of a city was a woodcut bird's-eye view of Norwich dated 1558, made by William Cunningham, a distinguished physician and astrologer, who included it in The Cosmoqraphical Glasse. a treatise on practical map-making.(Fig.0.2) Topographers William Smith and John Norden were followed by John 4- Speed, well-known even today, who provided many English and Irish towns with their earliest printed plans.(7) More accurate and detailed plans were produced by the end of the 17th century, like the one by Jaimes Millerd of Bristol, and that by Wenceslaus Hollar of the ruined city of London after the Great Fire. Hollar had made maps and plans for the Royalist cause and returned to England when Charles II was restored to the throne. Surveys for the army were drawn up in the Drawing Room of the Board of Ordnance at the Tower of London. Paul Standby was trained there as a draughtsman, and sent to Scotland for the Highlands Survey in the 1740s, where new techniques of survey and topographical description were developed. (Fig.0.7) These proved useful in the Napoleonic Wars, the Peninsula Wars, in the subjugation of the Irish, and finally in the British colonial expansion in the first half of the nineteenth century. Standby became a key figure in the rise of the new interest in landscape painting, in the 'emotional appropiation of landscape in terms of the beautiful, the picturesque, and the sublime1 , but he exercised at the same time a compelling influence over the adoption of empirical naturalism in topographic art. He became a founding member of the Royal Academy. The pressure on the representational arts to move in the direction of naturalism was strong at the end of the eighteenth century, and 'topography came to exercise a commanding influence upon landscape as a fine art because of its continuing importance to the army and navy.'(8) Topography, of course was the stuff and substance of surveying. In the 18th century, therefore, there was a great improvement in surveying methods and town plans were produced to a higher standard of accuracy.

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