STATE LIBRARY OF J. D. SOMERVILLE ORAL HISTORY COLLECTION

OH 561/28

Full transcript of an interview with

H. A. BAILEY

On 5 March 1973

By Mary Rose Goggs

Recording available on CD

Access for research: Unrestricted

Right to photocopy: Copies may be made for research and study

Right to quote or publish: Publication only with written permission from the State Library OH 561/28 H. A. BAILEY

NOTES TO THE TRANSCRIPT

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J.D. SOMERVILLE ORAL HISTORY COLLECTION, MORTLOCK LIBRARY OF SOUTH AUSTRALIANA: INTERVIEW NO. OH 561/28

Interview of Mr HA Bailey by Mary Rose Goggs, recorded in Adelaide on 5th March 1973 for broadcast on ABC Radio 5CL on 11th March 1973 as part of the series ‘Now in retirement’.

TAPE 1 SIDE A

When most people think of surveyors, Mr Bailey, they have a mental picture of two men, one with a theodolite standing on some apparently arbitrary spot, and the other some distance away doing one knows what what. Is this basically in what surveying consists?

Yes; there are different types of surveying, of course, but basically it is the measurement of distances, the positioning of points on the ground and the recording of them in order to put them on a map.

Did you specialise, yourself, in one kind rather than another?

Yes; I specialised in land boundary surveys.

Did you choose to become a surveyor?

Not really. I chose to become a draftsman, but after spending one year in the office of the Lands Department I found that I was meeting elderly draftsmen with poor eyesight, bent backs through poring over maps. I also met survey cadets, young fellows who came in with exciting tales of the bush, and I thought, ‘Well, this is the life for me.’

Surveying is something that one goes out and does; you don’t do it in an office. Did you go immediately into distant country areas?

Yes; as soon as I was appointed a cadet I went to the Cobdogla district on the River Murray and spent one year and one day in that one camp.

Survey work is preparation for something, isn’t it? With what did these early camps have to do?

In those days most of our early camps were for the opening of land. The Cobdogla survey was for irrigation purposes, but many of our survey parties at that time were in distant parts  on Eyre Peninsula, for instance, on the West Coast  opening up farming land.

How did you live, Mr Bailey?

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We lived in tents; we had to be self-sufficient. I think we all enjoyed the life. We certainly had to be resourceful. When motor vehicles were first used in camps they were driven in the bush away from roads and we had to improvise many repairs.

You must have been bogged often, too.

Oh, many times.

In 1926, Mr Bailey, you joined a private firm in Mildura. Was this different work from that which you’d been doing?

No; the work was very similar. It was still land boundary work, and in fact we had one very large contract for the Western Land Board of which was similar to the work I had been doing in South Australia. This was the ….. ….. subdivision, when we subdivided a quarter of a million acres of land, and I remember the distance around the outer boundaries of our block of land was just a hundred and fifty miles.

Just a huge area, isn’t it?

Yes, it was a huge area. We ran three survey parties at the one time on this area.

In 1939 you left the private firm in Mildura and returned to the Lands Department. Was this a personal choice, or were you what I believe they call ‘manpowered’?

Oh, no; the manpower came into being later. I left Mildura early in 1939 before the War started, and this was a personal decision  for family reasons we wished to return to our old home in Adelaide  but when you speak of manpower, this strained labour when people in employment were not allowed to change their job or not allowed to give up their work unless it was satisfactory to the manpower authorities. And this affected me later when I had completed the military mapping work I was engaged on.

This was the necessary war work, wasn’t it?

Yes. An emergency mapping work was carried out by the Lands Department for the military, but then the Surveyor-General, Mr Hambidge, asked me to devise a means for covering the mapping, placing the position of every house, windmill and physical object within an accuracy of about one hundred feet in as quick a manner as possible. And for this I devised a scheme of graduating the speedometer on the

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utility into chains instead of the tenths of a mile as shown on most, and with the use of a prismatic compass taking bearings to objects in the paddocks and another little instrument called an optical square, I was able to map the area very quickly.

Did you do this alone, or did you have assistance?

I only had a lad as a driver with me.

And are your maps still used, Mr Bailey?

No, not officially. They’ve been superseded by more accurate maps by the use of aerial photography. It was then, when this work was completed, that I applied to Manpower to be released from my work with the Lands Department in order to join the Air Force.

What kind of survey work did you do with them?

Well, at first I was on the mapping of airfields that had already been constructed, with a unit familiarly known as the ‘Berks and Bricks’ [?]. Then, after that, I joined an airfield construction squadron and worked in further out areas locating sites for new aerodromes and doing engineering surveys for the construction of these aerodromes.

Did you get away from Australia?

Yes, I spent quite some time in Dutch New Guinea and also, at the end of the War, I was in Moritai.

After the War, Mr Bailey, you went back to the Lands Department and, in 1947, became a member of the Surveyors’ Board. What did that entail?

Well, the Surveyors’ Board is responsible for the setting of examinations  or it was at that stage, before the Institute of Technology arranged the course  we were responsible for the setting and marking of examination papers for candidates for a licence in terrain, and we also were concerned with the ethics of the qualified surveyors.

Your responsibilities must have been further extended when you became Chief Surveyor in 1955. Were there any notable survey works being done at that time?

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Yes, I think the most notable would be the subdivisions for the township of Whyalla. Whyalla is a completely government township, and the design and the allotment for the work to the surveyors was the responsibility of the Chief Surveyor.

Whyalla’s grown enormously, hasn’t it, over the years? Has it been a continuing work?

Yes; this has been a continuing work, and I suppose for the last fifteen years I have been very closely concerned with the design of Whyalla and the allotment of various areas for different purposes.

In 1961, you yourself became Surveyor-General. I believe this was rather a historic occasion.

Well, yes, it was in that it was just one hundred years since Goyder was appointed Surveyor-General.

Have there been many Surveyors-General in South Australia?

There were fourteen before myself, and I had the honour to work under just half of my predecessors.

Which of your new duties did you enjoy most?

Well, I think the job I most enjoyed was the survey of the /South Australian border. This was brought about by a request of the Presbyterian Board of Missions to mark the border to enable fencing for a cattle station. In collaboration with the Surveyor-General of the Northern Territory, and my Deputy Surveyor- General, we decided on the methods to be used for marking this border, and this is the first time in history that a border has been marked on a parallel of latitude marked on the ground by the adoption of geodetic stations, familiarly known as a ‘trig station’ from the old term of triangulation.

Was it easy to do?

Well, there were many problems with it. Most of the field has been carried out by the Northern Territory surveyors, but all the computations were done by surveyors of the Lands Department in South Australia.

And eventually you would have met up with the Western Australian border.

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Yes, and that was a historic occasion. We arranged for a little celebration at the corner, a meeting of the Surveyors-General of , Northern Territory and South Australia. The corner is now known as Surveyor-Generals’ Corner, from that meeting, and it is not generally known that there are two corners, about four hundred feet apart.

How did that happen?

Well, back in about 1922, observations were taken to fix the longitude of a point near the Transcontinental Railway and another point up in the Kimberleys known the Austral Pillar. Well, these observations were ….. time observations to a star or a series of stars, compared with wireless telegraphy observations of time sent from observatories in France and England. Again, this was a first time – it was the first time that wireless signals had been sent both ways around the world and received simultaneously, from east to west and from west to east. The time signals must have been fairly accurate, because there was only a difference of one quarter second of time between the fixing on the Transcontinental and the fixing at the Austral Pillar, but now these have been joined by a geodetic survey we have found that this quarter of a second of time difference had occurred and this represents about four hundred feet on the ground.

But it doesn’t show on the map, does it?

No; well, most maps are too small in scale to be able to show the four hundred feet for this particular point. It’s not as if there was a township there.

Have surveyors sometimes made extraordinary mistakes which have become incorporated in maps for all time?

Well, if we go to the other side of South Australia we find that a mistake was made, and this has caused the South Australia/ boundary to miss the New South Wales/South Australia boundary by roughly two miles.

You are also, as Surveyor-General, a member of the National Mapping Council. What does it do, Mr Bailey?

The National Mapping Council really controls the priorities of mapping. The mapping is for defence purposes as well as for development purposes. The members of the National Mapping Council are the Director of National Mapping, a

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Commonwealth officer, the Surveyor-General of each state, the Director of Military Survey and the Naval Hydrographer.

You were a member, too, of various other committees, the South Australian Planning Authority and the Nomenclature Committee: that sounds full of possibilities. How are names decided?

The names of suburbs are suggested by the land developer and approved by the Nomenclature Committee. Until recently, the Nomenclature Committee had no statutory power, they could only make recommendations. But while I was Chairman of the Committee, we designed a new Geographical Names Act in order to give the Board its statutory power to control naming of all geographical places.

So that it’s no longer possible for developers to do this.

No. Developers now, although they will select names, they have to be approved by the Geographic Names Board.

Have you a policy on old names that have grown up from common use?

Oh, yes. This policy has always been to adopt the old name, to continue with the old name as far as possible. But it’s not always possible because of the duplication of names which we have to avoid for postal reasons if for no other.

Another of your many activities had to do with electoral redistribution. How far is this a surveyor’s work and how far a politician’s?

Well, I wouldn’t say it was a surveyor’s work at all. It becomes one of the duties of a Surveyor-General. In the federal sphere  and I was on two federal redistribution committees  in the federal sphere, under the Constitution, it is necessary to periodically rearrange the electoral boundaries. In the state sphere an Act is passed each time appointing the members of the Commission and detailing the lines on which the Commission will work in deciding the boundaries of each electorate.

Have you any regrets about things you haven’t been able to do?

Well, I think I have one, and that is that during the time I was Surveyor-General I was not able to rewrite the Regulations under the Surveyors’ Act. This was a task that had been required for many years, but I was never able to afford the staff or the time to carry it out.

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I’m beginning to realise, Mr Bailey, that a surveyor’s work touches everybody’s life. Does this mean that the code of ethics is pretty high on the surveyor’s list of priorities?

The integrity of the surveyor is essential, and the ethics of the surveyors is controlled by the Surveyors  by the Institution of Surveyors. The capabilities of the surveyor are tested by the Surveyors’ Board in his application for a licence. Security of title is important to industry and to the home owner, and without correct, accurate definition of boundary there can be no security of title. The government guarantees indefeasibility of title, and so I would hope that in some way there will always be some government control over the issue of licences for surveyors.

Mr Bailey, thank you very much.

END OF TAPE: END OF INTERVIEW.

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