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Written by Judith Hickson

On Queensland Day, A C Gregory’s theodolite offers an interesting way into thinking about not just the physical creation of Queensland’s borders, but also about the idea and creation of ‘Queensland’ and how Queenslanders imagine and experience themselves and the place they live. 

This transit theodolite made by the London firm of Troughton and Sims, was owned and used by Sir Augustus Charles Gregory, Queensland’s first Surveyor-General 1859-1875, President of the Royal Society of Queensland 1887-88 and a trustee of the Queensland Museum from 1876-1899.  

According to Government records, in 1865, Augustus Gregory and W. A. B. Greaves, District Surveyor of the northern portion of New South Wales, met by appointment at Mungindi, on the Barwon, the 29th parallel of latitude, in order to fix the position of the inter-colonial boundary line between the colonies of Queensland and New South Wales. W.D. Campbell reported in The Surveyor in 1895 that each party carried a theodolite for reference lines and a sextant for astronomical observations.^1  1 

 

Lines in the sand: deciding Queensland’s border 

Held each year on 6 June, Queensland Day marks the date in 1859 when Queen Victoria signed the letters patent to allow for the formation of a new colony separate from New South Wales, forthwith to be called Queensland.  The official pronouncement of the new colony by Queensland’s newly-appointed first Governor,  Sir George Ferguson Bowen, took place on 10 December 1859. The historic event attracted thousands of spectators as Governor Bowen was sworn in by Judge Alfred Lutwyche and the proclamation read by Abram Orpen Moriarty from the balcony of ‘Adelaide House’, the Governor’s temporary residence in Anne Street. 

Not everyone was happy with Queen Victoria’s decision.  Sir John Bayley Darvall, addressing the New South Wales Legislative Assembly in October 1859, expressed outrage on behalf of his fellow legislators that ‘the assent of the Legislature [for the proposed separation] had not been obtained …and that the population of the proposed colony of Queensland was so small and scattered as to be able to discharge the duties of self-government economically or efficiently.’^2  2

And,  if these kinds of disputations were not enough, the final placement of the border between New South Wales and Queensland at the 29th parallel aroused more controversy and debate than any other Australian land boundary.³³  Journalling under a pseudonym, a columnist ‘Cribbage’ quoted from the ‘Herald’: ‘After all our endeavours to have a distinct and moderate boundary fixed for our ambitious Queensland neighbours; after gaining the twenty-eight parallel instead of the thirtieth; British ignorance and administrative blundering have as usual made a most unmitigated medley, and left abundant room for future squabbling’. ⁴⁴ Given the strong resistance and protracted lobbying by both New South Wales and Queensland governments, the dispute over the border was not fully resolved for almost a decade.  

Border thoughts 

From one perspective, borders serve political, social and economic purposes, yet former understandings of borders are increasingly being re-thought because of how they were conceptualised and the reasons and context in which they were created. 

Prior to colonisation, the place we know today as Queensland didn’t exist at all, but was a space imagined in multiple complex and different ways by the First Nations peoples who inhabited its many-varied landscapes.  

In the popular imagination of its colonisers, Queensland came into existence as a bounded geographical entity, a new spatial reality, with one heterogeneous population – excluding its Aboriginal occupants – in 1859.  

In 1983, political scientist and historian, Benedict Anderson, developed the term ‘imagined communities’ to describe the way nations and states are, what he termed, ‘socially constructed communities’, imagined by a group of people who all consider themselves as part of that group.⁵⁵⁶⁶ 

Emeritus Professor David Carter, in his essay, Imagination: how people have imagined Queensland, cites Brisbane-born novelist Thea Astley who in 1976 ‘still felt that ‘Queensland ha[d] retained much of its quality as an abstraction, an idea’. In other words, much of it remained ‘imaginary’ or ‘was still to be imagined, despite the rich evocations of locale, climate and community which had by then begun to appear from writers like Astley herself.’⁷⁷

Returning to A C Gregory, in defining a boundary his theodolite was more than a surveying instrument. Devices like this were used to transfer invisible political lines into physical reality, representing a western cultural desire to impose geometric order onto vibrant organic landscapes. Surveying equipment bridges the gap between physical reality and historical context, serving as a powerful tool for historic reimagining. Rethinking objects such as this at the intersection of technology, sociology and philosophy, prompts a reframing of the past and, as Professor Carter suggests, and re-imagining a future for Queensland beyond borders to a re-imagining of this place and space. 

1. Surveying the Queensland New South Wales border, ↩︎
2. ‘Colonial Parliament’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 5 October 1859, p. 5. ↩︎
3. Carney, Gerard, The Story behind the Land Borders of the Australian States – A Legal and Historical Overview, Public Lecture, High Court of Australia, 10 April 2013, p. 22. ↩︎
4. ‘Boundary Bungling’, The Maitland Mercury and Hunter River General Adviser, 11 February 1860, p. 6. ↩︎
5. Anderson, B, 1983, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Verso, London. ↩︎
6. According to Manu Goswami is an associate professor of history at New York University, Imagined Communities is the single most cited English-language text in the human sciences. ↩︎
7. [1] Carter, D, 2010, Imagination: how people have imagined Queensland, essay, Queensland Historical Atlas ↩︎