Traralgon and District Historical Society Inc.

April 2006 

                                                         My life as a  Land surveyor

 Clarrie Heron, was born in Hawthorn, Melbourne, and is married to wife, Win. Clarrie enjoys distance walking and has walked in the Cradle Mountain area in Tasmania. He also enjoys competition tennis and put this experience to good effect by coaching the youth of St James Anglican tennis team for 17 years. Currently he assists his son, Stephen, in his interior decorating business.

Having completed Matriculation in 1939, I obtained a position as an 'articled Land Surveying student' with a Melbourne surveying firm, that naturally also involved the study of Land Surveying and Civil Engineering at the R.M.I.T. at night. My wages were equivalent today of one dollar a week.

Being wartime, my firm did not have a car so most of the jobs required carrying survey gear on public transport to all parts of Melbourne. I also had my first visit to Traralgon, to subdivide the Greenwood Grove area into building allotments. Our firm was then constantly visiting Traralgon and we became involved with the subdivision of land of a large housing project for the A.P.M.   

ln 1942 I joined the army and was drafted to survey a unit that was to have its base in Darwin. Arriving at the town, the area was found to be one of great devastation, many buildings shattered and with bomb craters everywhere. On the morning of   19th February, 1942, 200 Japanese planes had bombed Darwin, sinking 8 ships in the harbour, killing 230 people and wounding over 1000 (the official announcement to the press being that 12 people were killed and 24 wounded). Over a period of 20 months, there were 64 air raids on Darwin and its surrounding areas.

Three infantry brigades had been sent to the Northern Territory but there were almost no military maps to assist their movements in defence or manoeuvers. Army patrol and naval ships operated in unchartered waters and R.A.A.F. air strips and radar stations operated without accurate latitudinal or longitudinal determination. It was necessary that these deficiencies be overcome as soon as possible, in the face of possible invasion. Out unit's immediate task was to supply survey control for the anti-aircraft and searchlight batteries as well as other military defence operations and then to map almost the entire coastline of Northern Australia part of the hinterland and the many inshore islands.

My next assignment was to carry out survey work aboard a small army survey vessel named AK 1221 Aroetta, working on the north coastline of Australia.  Travelling by boat in the Arafura Sea and surveying along the northern coastline of Australia we had to be very careful as there were so many hazards. If the airforce sighted anything unusual on their flyovers, we were then asked to investigate. I have a photograph  of the Aroetta and copies of small portions of detailed maps of the City of Melbourne and Port Phillip Bay that our unit found in a Japanese map depot in Rabaul, left by the retreating Japanese.

I was discharged from the army in late 1946 and then sat for my final examinations to become a licensed surveyor. In 1947 I joined the Department of Lands and Survey and was appointed to the position of Surveyor for the district of Gippsland. The Surveyor General handed me files of about 20 crown leases to be surveyed and I was assigned two assistants and an old 1935 utility.

We set out on my first survey, which was a crown lease application located in the hills of Callignee. The month was October and after reaching Traralgon, we headed up the road to Balook and ran into dense fog in the Callignee   area. We were unable to determine our exact location. We stopped the vehicle and a thin, wiry, scruffy looking 60-year-old man dressed in a ragged overcoat came hurrying up to ask us if we  were looking for work. He invited us to bring our maps up to his dwelling, which was 50 metres up the hill, and we could have a cup of tea while he defined our location on our map. I was to learn that this man, Ernie 'Dingo' Sutton, was the most famous of all the Gippsland hill country eccentrics.

His kitchen was his only living area and had a hewn timber bed, a hewn timber table and two rickety chairs. His bedding was potato bags sewn together and his pillow was pure straw. In the corner of the room, a string of bluish sausages were hanging up, while on the 'table' some butter was visible sitting in the middle of a dirty cloth. The fire was burning and the logs were placed at right angles to the fireplace, sticking out a few metres into the room. As soon as we entered the house he was all for accommodating us for the night. He showed us through the house. Every room had wooden floorboards, all covered with bales of hay. The windows were generally covered with hessian bags, no doubt with the objective of keeping out the rain. I put my maps down on the bed and from under the potato bags crawled another dishevelled man who had obviously been drinking.

In his youth, for pocket money, Ernie had set about collecting wool offcuts, mainly from barbed wire fences.  Later as a young man, he selected a block in the Balook area. In the 1920's he worked as a bridge builder, a bullock team driver, and had other odd jobs as well as running his farm. He was a reclusive bachelor and a self-educated improviser, constantly on the move and often sleeping in hollow logs. He worked exceptionally hard, mostly by himself and was often seen milking his cows by moonlight after a hard day's work. He rarely changed his clothes and was never seen   to wash. He either walked or rode      everywhere and hardly ever used or needed cash.

The period between 1940 and 1970 was one when most of the landowners walked off their farms in the Callignee area because the properties were no longer viable. It is said that Dingo bought as many properties as he found to be available at an average price of ten shillings an acre.

He finished up owning 6,000 acres. AlI his stock sales were for cash and by 1960 he had become a wealthy man, although most of his property dwellings became incinerated as time went on.

The  Surveyor General invited me to carry out crown grant application inspections in the east end of the state. I gained the assistance of an eastern Victorian Lands Department Inspector and we travelled in the Gelantipy area on Brumby horses inspecting the relevant applications.

I met my future wife and we married in January, 1950. The Lands Department moved us to Traralgon as it was the most central location to most of my work. I carried out many surveys in the area but being absent from home all the time didn't suit us, so I resigned my position and commenced operating a land surveying private practice.

One of my first private assignments was working for the Woodside L.E. Oil company. It had established a camp base on the strip of land opposite the existing McLoughlin's Beach housing estate. We had the use of a seaworthy motorboat and our job was taking over an existing area extending westerly from McLoughlin's Beach, covering St Margaret Is., Snake Is. and Little Snake Is.. After making two depth bores they decided that there wasn't a great future in proceeding any further in their search for oil in the area.

I well remember surveying the farm land on which the Hazelwood   power station is now constructed. We were also involved with the coal excavation control in the Morwell open cut and we also carried out similar work at Loy Yang.

I found that one of the greatest problems subdividing rural allotments in the area was the Latrobe Valley Planning Scheme that demanded a ten-chain frontage for 10 acre blocks. This condition resulted in many blocks being very irregular in shape and quite often a complete waste of land. The idea behind the Scheme was to control the amount of land that was being subdivided in certain areas of the Valley until they determined the exact amount of land left for coal excavation. The regulation proved to be a great success in slowing subdivisions in rural areas. Then a very odd plan was produced showing possible locations of a large number of new power stations in the Latrobe Valley. Some time after the production of this plan, the subdivision 10 chain frontage requirement was lifted. I am not sure what happened to the proposed power station location plan.   ln Morwell during the 1950s and 1960's the Housing Commission continued their subdivision easterly along the highway to the Waterhole Creek and across the Creek a large residential development known as the Bridle Estate was also in operation, extending easterly along the highway to Bridle Road. Then further easterly again fronting the highway and also part of the Bridle Estate, a business and industrial development proved to be most successful. A large commercial development was established south of the highway and there seemed to be no stopping the growth of Morwell.

In Traralgon from 1940, the A.P.M. developed many housing subdivisions over a large area of our town. This was for a period of about 10 years and it was a significant factor in the growth of Traralgon Our firm was much appreciative of the constant flow of work given to us by the A.P.M. over a lengthy period. The Housing Commission was also heavily involved, carrying out continuous subdivisions for many years. ln the 1970s there was a developmental upturn in Traralgon,  with many new housing allotments being created. Around the same time there was an overdue residential subdivision at Tyers. This housing estate had the most beautiful outlook and the area has gone ahead in leaps and bounds.  Traralgon, from a town planning perspective, is now a well balanced town that has a great future. I retired from my surveying practice in 1979.