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Lands Act 1862 'Duffy Act' Map - *BETA*

VPRS 7664/P3 Unregistered Maps and Plans (Legislative Assembly), unit 1 Map of the Colony of Victoria

The Victorian Lands Act 1862 (or the Duffy Act) released ten million acres of Victorian land for selection. The map detailing this land was lodged with Parliament as part of the process of registering the Act. This map measures 6 x 4 metres and apparently hung on the walls of Parliament from 1862 to 1865. The map was listed on the UNESCO Australian Memory of the World register in 2008 as being of significance to Australia.

Background to creation of the map
The information recorded on the map summarises much of the activities of the New South Wales government with respect to land first in the Port Philip District then in the separate state of Victoria from 1836 to 1856. The New South Wales government had arranged for special surveys in the 1840s to encourage investment in the Port Phillip District. The map had began life as a sequence of smaller, rectangular shaped lithograph copies of the 1856 base map. These smaller lithographs were then assembled together to form the 1862 Land Map.

The Cultural Heritage Unit of the University of Melbourne secured funds to digitise the map in 2006.

Significance of the map
The map is a unique record of early Australian governments attempts to ‘unlock the land’ and make land available to settlers who had arrived in the colony of Victoria looking for gold and to later settlers looking for new opportunities.

The map reflects the vision of Victoria’s Lieutenant Governor Charles La Trobe, and his local autonomy. His 1840s vision can be seen for townships and other reserves. It also makes clear the break he made with NSW over the interpretation of the order in council. He refused to issue long term leases, much to the annoyance of the squatters who then had to resort to purchase. This they did in the 1850s after separation from NSW. The failure to issue long term leases made Victoria more open for selection in the 1860s. The map clearly shows the introduction of Geodetic Survey - the careful subdivision of the colony in primary squares by main lines corresponding in their position and direction to meridians of longitude and parallels of latitude, with each square about 25,000 acres. This Jeffersonian way of dividing the country obliterated
aboriginal possession and set the boundaries for sale and other forms of alienation.

Nineteenth-century Victoria as a landscape was constructed differently by different communities – the Indigenous population, the explorers, the squatters, and colonial governments. The activities of the earliest colonial map-makers in Victoria – like Major Thomas Mitchell, explorer and Surveyor-General – did not build on an ‘empty’ space. Rather it laid their understanding over an existing human landscape, which had been constructed over thousands of years by 'fire-stick farming' by the Kulin nations. By the early 1840s squatters, with their flocks of sheep and herds of cattle, occupied the grass plains and open woodlands. This extensive land grab, indicated by red on the map demonstrates the squatters' utter rejection of indigenous ownership.

Indeed, Mitchell’s travels into Victoria in 1836, and his map-making and naming activities, were a crucial element of the colonisation and settlement of Victoria. The 1862 Land Map can be seen as the administrators’ representation of the success of the colonising project in Victoria and their imposition of order, civilisation and progress onto what was seen as empty wilderness.

While the map has significance as an object, or even an icon, it also provides a succinct visual representation of the alienation of land in the colony of Victoria, from the first land sales overseen by La Trobe in 1837 when Victoria was administered from New South Wales, up to the Duffy Act in 1862. The boundaries of the system imposed on the landscape by successive lands administrators, categorising areas of the land as parishes and counties, are clear, as are the towns then in existence, as well as natural features of Victoria’s topography and landscape.

The map’s significance is that it showed at 1862:

• the extent of dispossession of land from the Aboriginal peoples in Victoria;
• it records the lands administration prior to 1852 that had been conducted under NSW legislation;
• the delineation of administrative and settlement units and boundaries;
• the extent of the alienation of lands from the Crown and by what means;
• the data gathered by land and marine survey at the point of the greatest activity for the first geodetic survey of Victoria;
• the map demonstrates the superb art of the nineteenth century cartographer.

The map has significance to the State archives in Victoria as it was in 1999 the first record officially received at the new Victorian Archives Centre in North Melbourne.

More information about the map and project can be found in Dr. Cate Elkner's article published in our online journal Provenance.

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