The Story behind the Land Borders of the Australian States

– A Legal and Historical Overview

Dr Gerard Carney presented the following paper on 10 April 2013 as part of the High Court Lecture Series.  The introduction appears below  along with a hyperlink to the full paper.  

I think it is safe to say that every Australian is able to draw roughly the land borders of the six  Australian States and of the Northern Territory. Less well known is the history behind these borders.

This lecture attempts to trace that history in terms of when, how and why these borders were drawn  where they are.

Time does not permit consideration of the coastline boundaries, which were determined by a  majority of the High Court in the Seas and Submerged Lands Act Case in 1975 to lie at the low-water mark. ¹ So, my apology to Tasmania which barely rates a mention in this lecture!  Nor do I cover the boundary of the Australian Capital Territory within New South Wales. Geographical barriers are usually the most effective land borders, such as mountain ranges, rivers,  lakes, gorges, or deserts. All of these geographical features have played some role in the drawing of Australia’s boundaries. But their role has been a secondary one on the mainland due to the extraordinary distances involved, and the fact that the internal geography of the continent was largely unknown at the time the UK authorities felt the need to define Australia’s land borders.

Instead, primary reliance was placed on the meridian lines of longitude (measured from the prime meridian at Greenwich²) and parallels of latitude (measured from the equator) — referred to by one commentator as those “celestially-described boundaries”. Why particular lines of longitude and latitude were selected is not entirely clear.

A significant determinate of a nation’s boundary is, of course, international law. In this respect, many may be surprised by the fact that the first land boundary created by the British on this continent in 1786 can be traced to a treaty between Portugal and Spain in 1494.

An important role often overlooked is that of the early surveyors of this continent whose arduous task was to physically mark out the actual boundaries between the colonies. They had to undertake complex calculations to arrive at the most accurate measurements then possible, knowing that their instruments denied them the mathematical accuracy they so earnestly sought. They also had to cope with a harsh environment which threatened their very survival. Nor was their ordeal over, when years later, some of their work is the subject of constitutional challenge in this Court!

So a study of Australia’s land boundaries involves the intersection of politics, constitutional and international law, geography, science, and at least up to the 19th century, stories of human endurance.

The most practical way to tell this story is to do so chronologically…

Click to view or download PDF of full article

Footnotes

1. New South Wales v Commonwealth (1975) 135 CLR 337.
2. The Greenwich prime meridian was internationally adopted in 1884 at the International Meridian Conference
   at Washington DC, although it was adopted by Britain well before that.