Victoria’s 2002 Selwyn Night
The Victorian Division’s annual highlight, the Selwyn night, was held in the ICE Theatre in Museum Victoria on 9th May 2002. The venue was most appropriate as the occasion coincided with the opening of the map exhibition ‘Beneath our Feet’, commemorating 150 years since Selwyn arrived in Victoria. The large attendance took advantage of the opportunity to examine the exhibition after the lecture.
 
The 2002 Selwyn Lecture
The 2002 Selwyn Lecture was delivered by Thomas A. Darragh. Tom studied geology at Melbourne University, gaining his PhD in 1982. After two years working in the Geology Department of the university he joined the National Museum of Victoria in 1965 as Curator of Fossils, and became deputy director in 1973. When the National Museum amalgamated with the Science Museum, he returned to research as Head of Geology and became a Senior Curator in Palaeontology in 1996. As is so often the case with senior staff, he retired following downsizing of the geology staff in June 2000 after 38 years with the Museum.
Tom’s major research interests are surprisingly wide-ranging, from Tertiary mollusca and biogeography to history, of Germans in Victoria, of geological studies in Victoria, and of engraving and lithography in colonial Victoria. He has written several books on these topics and continues his reseach in these various fields.
 
2002 SELWYN LECTURE: A series of beautiful maps…a credit to the Colony.
by Thomas A. Darragh
When Alfred Selwyn arrived in Melbourne in 1852, Victoria had a geologist but as no one seemed to know what he should do—this was left up to Selwyn himself. He decided his main task was to construct a geological map of the Colony accompanied by cross sections and short explanatory memoirs.
His first report, on the Mount Alexander goldfield, was ready in 1853 but, whilst printing it was easy, the map was a different matter. Fortunately for him, the young and energetic Andrew Clarke had just been appointed Surveyor General and established a lithographic branch of the Lands Department to undertake the production of maps. Selwyn's map was one of the first maps to be printed, with colours applied by hand. The lithographic stones were of Solnhofen Limestone, from the same quarry in which Archaeopteryx had been discovered.
Without Selwyn working on his own the work proceeded slowly, leading to agitation from goldfields members of Parliament to funds being granted for proper mineralogical and topographical surveys. Selwyn engaged a draftsman and sufficient staff to mount four field parties under Norman Taylor, Christopher Aplin, George Ulrich and Richard Daintree and decided on a grid pattern at a scale of 2 inches to the mile. As the full maps were very large they were published in four portions—the famous ‘Quarter Sheet’ series. Maps were to be engraved for publication. The engraved lines included the map border, cultural features, cadastral boundaries, creeks, topographic lettering, and geological boundaries, but no representation of relief. The legend and scale were also engraved on some maps.
After engraving, Selwyn was faced with the problem of issuing coloured geological maps. Printing large numbers directly from a copperplate was impractical and hand colouring was prohibitively expensive. A faster, cheaper option was colour printing by lithography. This process involved making a print from a copperplate onto lithographic transfer paper and then putting the transfer paper on a clean lithographic stone image-side down, transferring the image to the stone which could then be used to print the map. Each colour needed its own stone. The map would be run through the press as many times as there were colours to apply to it. Registration of the colours was the main problem, and was achieved by having two marks on the stone (usually at line corners so as to be unobtrusive) to which the paper was aligned by using a stick with two pins that matched the marks. The pins were pushed through the paper and aligned with the marks on the stone.
Colour printing of maps was still in its infancy in the 1850s. Attempts had been made in France, Austria and Germany in the 1840s, with some success, but only the Austrian and French geological surveys used it to any extent. In Britain it was not applied to official geological maps until 1896 and hand colouring of older maps continued until the 1920s. There was therefore very little precedent to guide Selwyn or his staff.
By April 1858, Selwyn had eight quarter sheets ready for publication and another 13 surveyed but not fully engraved. In the same year he met Joseph Aresti who had colour printed John Mylne's Geological Map of London in 1851, the first colour printed British geological map. Aresti was given the task of printing two maps but these were not up to the standard expected by Selwyn, although they have the distinction of being the first colour printed geological maps in Australia, if not the southern hemisphere.
At the same time, John Phillips, a Cornish mining engineer, had been directed by the Surveyor General to map the Ballarat Goldfield geologically, completely independently of Selwyn's Survey. Selwyn was landed with the task of publishing the map. Printing went to the lowest tender, by Fergusson & Mitchell, but the maps were poorly printed. Most were rejected by Selwyn, who was making little progress in getting his maps printed. To break the logjam, the Lithographic Printing Branch was set up in 1858 with Thomas Ham in charge at £400 per year, a hand lithographic press was purchased as well as lithographic stones and inks, and work commenced on printing maps in colour.
 

Although Ham’s first map was available mid-1859 it was never formally issued and the first maps actually issued for sale appeared in April 1860 and comprised the four sheets making up the map of the Melbourne area. One thousand copies of each were printed, which involved passing each sheet of paper through the hand press eight times. This sheet involved 12,000 handlings, and for the four sheets making up the Melbourne map, a total of 36,000 manipulations were required. Given the backlog even this method was not speedy enough and Ham suggested a further innovation, the application of steam power to drive the press, which would not only save much hard labour, but would also increase production 4 or 5 times. A power press was purchased from England and installed in the Government Printing Office and began work in November 1860. Selwyn now had two presses working: the newly imported power press as well as the first hand press, altered to work as a power press. By the end of December 1860, five maps were printed and issued to the public and six others were at various stages of production. In addition, several plates were printed for a work on the natural history of Victoria by Frederick McCoy, Director of the National Museum of Victoria. As an indication of the pride Ham and his superior felt about these innovations, the maps carried the imprint 'Lithographic Steam Printing Executed by the Geological Survey Department at the Govt. Printing Office, Melbourne.'

 
However, all achievements came to an unhappy end in 1860 when the Lithographic Branch was suddenly abolished because of political changes. Ham's reward for his hard work was dismissal. During the three months in which he was retained, he managed to finish a few maps that were still in progress. Later in the year, after another change of Government, the Lithographic Branch was reconstituted with a much smaller staff. When the Geological Survey was abolished in December 1868 it had issued 59 quarter sheet maps, with the remaining maps in progress (six remaining quarter sheets, several goldfield maps, two geological maps of Victoria, two of Australia as well as many mining plans and illustrations for departmental publications) finished soon after. The Lithographic Branch had produced some of the finest geological maps ever to be printed in Australia.