Overview

James Meehan stepped off the convict ship Friendship in 1800 under an alias, a transported Irish United Irishman sentenced to life for his part in the turbulence of 1798. Within months, the colonial government had moved him out of the gangs and into the Survey Department. For the next two decades he walked, measured and drew his way across New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land, turning imperial orders into the grids and town plans that still shape Australia today. Lines of a Convict Surveyor follows Meehan from the fields of Offaly to the banks of the Hawkesbury, from the early streets of Sydney to the new inland town of Goulburn, and from a convict's bunk to the deputy surveyor-general's desk. Along the way, it shows how a man who began as a political prisoner became indispensable to governors, a key figure in Catholic Sydney's push for St Mary's Chapel, and one of the quiet architects of the colonial land system. This is not a story of grand speeches or heroic exploration. Meehan's power lay in the small, technical decisions that made the colonial machine work: where a boundary line would kink, which ridge would carry a road, which rise would be reserved for a church, and which farmer would be told to move his fence. His careful surveys brought security to emancipists and free settlers - and at the same time helped lock in a regime that treated Aboriginal law and tenure as if they did not exist. Lines of a Convict Surveyor is Book Two in the Shadows on the Map series, a set of historical studies about the mostly forgotten surveyors and administrators whose lines and paperwork still define the landscapes Australians live in. It is a clear-eyed, unsentimental look at mid-level power in a penal colony: how a transported Irish Catholic turned exile into security, and how his neat maps outlived him.

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