Thomas Mitchell

Major Thomas Livingstone Mitchell was the man who turned south-eastern Australia from speculation into survey. As Surveyor-General of New South Wales he rode thousands of miles, mapped rivers and ranges, named "Australia Felix" and built the cadastral framework that still sits under titles, roads and towns. For generations he was remembered simply as a heroic explorer who "opened up" the interior.

This book tells how he actually made eastern Australia - and what that making cost.

Gordon J. MacKenzie follows Mitchell from Peninsular War draughtsman under Wellington to colonial power broker in Sydney, rebuilding the Survey Department into a machine that could measure, divide and sell the land. On his expeditions we see convict chainmen, Aboriginal guides and armed escorts moving through contested country; we watch Mount Dispersion shift from a bland label on a map to a recognised massacre site; and we see how neat lines on paper became instruments of dispossession as well as order.

Placing Mitchell alongside contemporaries such as John Septimus Roe, Thomas Mitchell: Surveyor-General and the Making of Eastern Australia shows how mapping, science and violence worked together to turn a string of penal settlements into a settler society. It asks what it means to live, now, inside a landscape whose boundaries, roads and place-names still follow the decisions of one driven, quarrelsome surveyor-general who believed he had measured the country, and never truly saw the worlds already in it.