Overview

Robert Hoddle is the man every Melburnian lives with and almost nobody knows. In 1837, the quiet imperial surveyor walked the banks of the Yarra and drew a simple grid of streets on confiscated Aboriginal Country. Nearly two centuries later, those straight lines still dictate where people live, who profits, who sweats in the heat and who gets pushed to the edges. Shadows on the Map: Robert Hoddle and the Making of Melbourne follows Hoddle from the Ordnance surveys of Britain to the rough colonial camps of New South Wales and the explosive growth of Port Phillip. It shows how a cautious, technically gifted public servant became the architect of a land-selling machine - and how his unremarkable choices locked in patterns of wealth, exclusion and car dominance that the city is still wrestling with today. This is not a hero story and not a simple denunciation. Gordon J. Mackenzie uses Hoddle's life as a case study in technical power: how ordinary professionals turn vague imperial orders into hard lines on paper, how those lines outlive their makers, and how later generations use them to justify both heritage branding and quiet injustice. Walking the laneways, freeways and planning fights of modern Melbourne, Shadows on the Map asks blunt questions about colonisation, property, ""liveability"" and responsibility. Hoddle's survey is finished. Ours isn't.

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