This gallery of surveyors’ theodolites and other objects is unparalleled in the southern hemisphere. Started by surveyor Henry Halloran (1869–1953) and continued by his son Warren (1927 – 2020) its theodolites and other scientific and mathematical objects tell the story of surveying from a Western Perspective using very accurate and precise tools of measurement, mathematics and geometry.
Surveying or the art of mapping and dividing up tracts of land is a time honoured tradition that has largely been superseded by the computer in the twenty-first century.
The Museum recognises the collection does not acknowledge First Nations people who often assisted surveyors and explorers in their quest to explore and map the land. In 1992 The Mabo decision recognised, for the first time since colonisation in Australia, that First Nations people had an equally sophisticated way of apportioning land for different uses within their own society and that the land was not ‘terra nullius’.
