|
Welcome to XNATMAP
A site for preserving NATMAP's (The Division of National Mapping) history and
maintaining contact with the people who were part of that history.
As the Australian Landsat Station (ALS), later the Australian Centre for Remote
Sensing (ACRES) was part of the Division its history also forms part of this site.
The XNATMAP site will close October 2025 when hosting terminates.
The XNATMAP website is archived in perpetuity under the PANDORA initiative of the National Library of Australia and associated State Libraries. Commenced in 1996, Pandora (Preserving and Accessing Networked Documentary Resources of Australia) is Australia's web archive; a growing collection of Australian online publications.
As resources permit, current information and some partially completed works will be finalised and uploaded as listed below.
- The name Martin Hotine (1898-1968) occurs in several instances in accounts of Australian national mapping and its history. While Hotine had no role in the actual mapping of Australia it is his techniques and later status in both war and peace that is recalled in this article by Paul Wise.
- Various, unique, historical photographs by John Allen, Harry Baker, Oystein Berg, Bob Bobroff, Jim Coombe, Terry Douglas, Oz Ertok, Bob Goldsworthy, Anne Sherrard, Bruce Willington and Paul Wise.
- In 1961, a paper titled Conformal Transformations from One Map Projection to Another, using Divided Difference Interpolation by Gordon Bertram Lauf (1914-1984) was published in the Bulletin Geodesique (International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics - IUGG). The paper was based on some six years of work which was initially published as Lauf's Doctor of Science thesis in 1951. Subsequently in 1983 this methodology was published in Geodesy and Map Projections, commissioned by the then Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, and in the National Mapping Council's 1986, Special Publication 10, The Australian Geodetic Datum - Technical Manual. Lauf's Method, as it became known, permitted the conformal transformation of coordinates from any conformal or orthomorphic map projection to any other conformal map projection. This article, by Paul Wise, explains and provides a means to perform the mathematics to achieve such a coordinate transformation along with the example of transforming historic coordinate positions such as those on the Transverse Mercator (TM), yard grid of the Australian R502 map series to equivalent GPS metric coordinates.
- Papers relating to The Boundary Line between South Australia and Victoria was a twenty-eight page document plus two plans, printed and bound in 1874. Only eight hundred copies were produced at that time by John Ferres, Government Printer, Melbourne, for the later consideration of the Victorian Parliament. The history of the contents of these Papers evolved from the efforts in marking the Boundary between the then Colonies of New South Wales and South Australia. The first attempt was in the south, between the Southern Ocean and River Murray, along what was to become the border between Victoria and South Australia and later north of the River Murray to 26 degrees south latitude, between South Australia and New South Wales. Despite ongoing disputation over the Victorian/South Australian results, all those years ago, it is shown that the work of all the Specialists involved used the technology and techniques available to them to achieve the best possible result using the data that was within their control. Had more accurate information been available to them at the time the results would have been different but no less accurate. This extensive review was prepared by Paul Wise.
Quicklinks
|
