All articles and papers about the Southwest Pacific Survey and its use of HIRAN can now be found via this link.
In 1954 SHORAN was used to fix position of scintillometer flights, and control for planimetric maps, in uraniferous areas in the Northern Territory by the then National Mapping Office.
Natmappers Jim Fominas, Trevor Trevillian and Gus Murray formed a field party, who in 1950, drove the Stuart Highway from Alice Springs to Darwin, undertaking Laplace Observations with a Wild T4 theodolite at selected locations. National Mapping's First Laplace Field Work describes what we now know about this very early work.
During July and August 1963, Klaus Leppert led a party of three to undertake Azimuth and Laplace observations in the Great Sandy Desert of WA. The field party occupied selected Trig stations between Sir Frederick's Range and Callawa. Natmap's Geodetic Survey parties had established these Trig stations and much of the connecting track between the points, in the preceding two years. Thanks to Klaus's daughter Kathy, documents and photos recording this survey have been preserved and provided to XNATMAP.
In 1972 Klaus was involved with geodetic operations in the Northern Territory. Photographs from this field trip may be viewed via this link.
During the Geodetic Survey of Australia a trigonometrical station was established on then Ayers Rock in 1958. To erect its standard cairn and beacon Natmap had received special permission from the Northern Territory Reserves Board. By the late 1960s the carefully constructed rock cairn and beacon had collapsed and a replacement monument was devised and installed in 1970. This article describes the events behind the 1970 remonumenting of the Ayers Rock Trigonmetrical Station.
H.A. (Bill) Johnson wrote this report in 1970 "Poolawanna : 1:250 000 Gravity Survey Levels" - as well as including photos at the time he mentions Larry Wells who was Surveyor Augustus Poeppel's assistant so to put HAJ's report in context additional information and more recent photos have been added. My thanks to Laurie McLean et al for the use of his photos taken during his 2012 trip across the 'Simpson' and John R Porter, Surveyor General (1987-1992), and Bill Haylock,former Chief Geodetic Surveyor, South Australian Department of Lands, for the use of their photos and documents.
The erratic tides in the Torres Strait made tidal predictions impracticable. In 1973, prior to the then Department of Transport installing eight tide gauges that would continuously transmit, by radio, tidal heights for use by vessels entering the strait, required accurate heights, referred to the mainland height datum, at the eight sites.
Laurie McLean's 2006 article about flying out of Kidson on spot photography sorties has been updated to also record his more recent visits to that particular location.
The Survey Operations Branch, National Mapping Canberra, undertook a major mapping control survey in the Archipelago of the Recherche, off Esperance Western Australia, in March 1984. The survey was to provide photogrammetric mapping control throughout three offshore, 1: 100 000 scale map sheet areas. Just after the survey, Paul Wise wrote a brief report on the work for the Dandenong Office's internal Nat Map News. Prior to this, in 1973, Aerodist had operated to the east of this area to coordinate a number of boat accessible islands. Frank Johnston's report on this 1973 survey is available via this link (note that the mentioned 1973 attachments are not available). Brian Murphy, Survey Party Leader during the March 1984 field survey, extracted and condensed his daily diary entries to provide a day-to-day report of the 1984, helicopter supported, field work including his own and other photographs.
A Brief Explanation of the Map Projection and Scale Factor for a mapping system in the then Development Area of Albury-Wodonga. This anonymous and undated internal paper discusses the issues involved in the selection of a mapping system for the development area.
Around 1986 Natmap undertook a number of projects, both in-house and by research, to evaluate the use of the spaceborne Large Format Camera (LFC) and the Shuttle Imaging Radar (SIR-B) imagery for mapping; the following papers report on these projects.
1986 - The topographic application of Large Format Camera space imagery - Manning 1986 - The use of SIR-B and LFC space images for mapping - Trinder 1986 - Cartographic applications of space imaging systems - Trinder & Wise
