Defining the ACT

Sheaffe, and fellow surveyors Harry Mouat and Freddie Johnston, deserve to be remembered in this our centenary year. Canberra streets are named after Sheaffe and Mouat, but it is the numerous survey marks installed by all three that still survive in the ranges that are their true memorial. Those survey marks, variously timber posts and iron and concrete installations, are direct links with the very birth of the capital territory.

Directing the work of the surveyors was Charles Scrivener (after whom Scrivener Dam is named). It was Scrivener who had the task of locating just where a city might be built in the rather nebulous ‘‘Yass-Canberra’’ site that federal parliament had decided upon for the national capital in 1908.

Scrivener also had to recommend where the borders of the Federal Capital Territory (the ACT since 1938) should run. In deciding that, he was guided by the federal ministers’ directive that the territory should encompass the new city’s water supply. The federal government did not want to have endless quarrels with NSW about water pollution. Those politicians were ahead of their time, and Canberrans have been in their debt ever since.

Water shaped the territory and explains its weird form. The Cotter River has always been our main supply, and explains why the ACT extends so far to the south-west, for that is where this vital river rises. Early water engineer Ernest de Burgh wrote of the Cotter that ‘‘it is impossible to imagine a catchment from which a purer supply could be obtained’’. Other sections of the border safeguard parts of the Molonglo and Naas-Gudgenby river catchments, and also follow the old Queanbeyan-Cooma railway.

Scrivener had originally wanted a horseshoe-shaped territory, which as well as the Cotter would have included the full Molonglo-Queanbeyan river catchment. But the NSW Government didn’t want to lose all of that catchment nor the town of Queanbeyan. Though the Queanbeyan River wasn’t incorporated into the territory, the federal government was granted water rights, which later proved significant when we came to build Googong Dam to complement the Cotter system in the 1970s.

Percy Sheaffe began the border survey in June 1910 on top of 1421-metre Mount Coree. How the young Queenslander felt about heading into the Brindabellas at the beginning of winter is unrecorded. Scrivener soon wrote of Sheaffe’s progress that frequent showery days and occasional snowfalls were not making the work easy.

After clambering down from precipitous Coree, Sheaffe reached the lowest point on the border at the Murrumbidgee River downstream of Uriarra Crossing. He went on around the northern border, crossing through the paddocks of anxious farmers who were worried about which of their lands would end up in the ‘‘Federal’’.

As Sheaffe moved down the railway line in the east, a second party set out from Coree, heading south along the rugged spine of the Brindabellas. This team was headed by New-Zealand-born Harry Mouat, known as ‘‘Happy Harry’’ to his colleagues because he so rarely smiled. He was destined for the wild country of the upper Cotter. Acting Commonwealth geologist Griffith Taylor wrote that ‘‘the upper valley of the Cotter is so rugged and far from all settlement that only one or two people have traversed it, and the map simply indicates it by a broken line in a perfectly blank strip of territory’’.

As Mouat moved south he picked up names until then known only by local bushmen, such as Mount Aggie, named after Agnes Franklin of Brindabella Station. Mouat made these bush names the official ones we know today. Later in the survey when his field assistant Reg Kelly almost died on a rugged peak, Mouat named it after him, Mount Kelly.

Just south of Rolling Ground Gap in May 1914, Mouat was forced off the ranges by blizzards. Scrivener had him spend that frozen winter surveying along the upper Cotter River looking for new dam sites. Corin Dam, built in the 1960s, is surprisingly close to one of the sites recommended by Mouat all those years ago.

Mouat had only just got married. Sheaffe married during the job. There was little comfort for young wives in the bush. There was also little privacy living under canvas, especially as the tents of the chainmen, labourers and the cook of each party were close by. To top it off, Sheaffe’s mother Isabel often visited! But there were creature comforts, and photos of the time depict a gramophone and silverware in Sheaffe’s tent.

In early 1915, Scrivener retired and Sheaffe was recalled into fledgling Canberra to take on higher duties. He was replaced on the south-eastern border by Frederick Johnston, a young West Australian. Johnston drove a Model T Ford down to the south; he had to go via Cooma as the road inside the territory was impassable for cars. But before he went, he had to get his licence. The Queanbeyan policeman who tested him had never been in a car before, and, according to Johnston, was terrified.

Johnston moved along the southern border, where the country was far too rough for the Ford to get beyond base camp. Johnston, Mouat and Sheaffe were all dependent on horses for travel and sometimes had to tramp on foot.

One day a local grazier quizzed Johnston about why he wasn’t married. Johnston evasively replied it was because girls were too particular. The grazier looked him in the eye and drawled, ‘‘You ought to come around our way – my gals aint partikalar.’’ Freddie wrote in his memoir ‘‘I did not call!’’

Finally, almost five years after the border survey began, Johnston and Mouat joined the line at a spot between Sentry Box Mountain and Wrights Hill. It was a celebratory moment, but with prohibition in force in the territory thanks to King O’Malley, it seems to have been a dry night.

During the 1990s I had the very good fortune (thanks to federal and ACT heritage funding) to recover the surveyors’ story from obscurity and to walk much of their route, searching for their original survey marks. I found more than 500, little knowing that Canberra’s worst recorded bushfire was just around the corner. Many survey marks and delicately engraved reference trees were destroyed in January 2003, but many survive and it was a privilege to have recorded the others so that their existence might be known by future generations.

Next time you look out to the ranges that so define the view from Canberra, spare a thought for the surveyors who charted our territory, helped safeguard our catchment, and whose surviving survey marks bring immediately to mind the very birth of the national capital.

• Matthew Higgins will speak about the ACT border survey at the National Museum of Australia on Friday, April 12 at 12.30pm in Visions Theatre. This is an event associated with the NMA’s new exhibition Glorious Days: Australia 1913 (for bookings, phone 62085021 or email bookings@nma.gov.au). He will also give the talk at the heritage workshop of the national Surveying and Spatial Sciences Institute Conference at the National Convention Centre on April 16 (registration and fee necessary; see www.sssc2013.org).