Southern Monaro

Mapmaker:

Charles Robert Scrivener (1855-1923)

Surveyor born at Windsor, New South Wales and educated at a denominational school and from the age of 8 assisted his partially blind father in his general store. He was an accountant at Orange in 1875 before joining the New South Wales Department of Lands as cadet ‘geodetic computer’ in the trigonometrical branch (1876). He passed the draughtsman’s examination (1877) and then was a surveyor’s apprentice, passing the Surveyors’ Board examination (1880) with 100 per cent score to become a licensed surveyor. 

From 1891 he carried out the re-survey and definition of the boundaries of the Gloucester estate of the Australian Agricultural Co. and in 1896 he was acting district surveyor of the Wagga Wagga district, which included the southern Monaro. Scrivener’s surveys in rugged country established his reputation as an extremely able bushman.

In 1910 Scrivener was appointed first director of Commonwealth lands and surveys. He established the land survey and property branch of the Department of Home Affairs and concentrated on the topographical, cadastral, triangulation and railway surveys connected with city planning and land purchase, until he and his staff were posted to Melbourne in 1914. He retired in 1915, having been appointed I.S.O. in 1913.