The Royal Australian Survey Corps (RA Svy) was a Corps of the Australian Army, formed on 1 July 1915 and disbanded on 1 July 1996. As one of the principal military survey units in Australia, the role of the Royal Australian Survey Corps was to provide the maps, aeronautical charts, hydrographical charts and geodetic and control survey data required for land combat operations.
Functional responsibilities associated with this role were: theatre wide geodetic survey for – artillery, naval gunfire and close air support – mapping and charting – navigation systems – command and control, communications, intelligence, reconnaissance and surveillance systems; map production and printing for new maps and charts, plans, overprints, battle maps, air photo mosaics and photomaps, rapid map and chart revision; map holding and map distribution; production, maintenance and distribution of digital topographic information and products. RA Svy survey and mapping information was, and still is, a key information source for geospatial intelligence.
The operational doctrine was that the combat force deployed into the area of operations with topographic products adequate for planning, force insertion and initial conduct of tactical operations, that new products and broad area updates of the topographic base would be provided by the support area and communication zone survey forces, and that the combat support survey force in the area of operations would update the topographic base, add tactical operational and intelligence information and provide the value-added products required by the combat force.Coulthard-Clark, CD, 2000, Australia's Military Mapmakers – The Royal Australian Survey Corps 1915–96, Oxford University Press,
The Historical Collection of the Survey Corps is maintained by the Australian Army Museum of Military Engineering at Holsworthy Barracks, south-west Sydney, New South Wales. Survey Corps Associations of ex-members, family and friends are located in Adelaide, Bendigo, Brisbane, Canberra, Perth and Sydney. Many wartime maps produced by the Survey Corps are in the Australian War Memorial collection, while all of the maps produced by the Corps are also in the national collection at the National Library of Australia. All of these are available to the public and some are on-line.
History
Origins Australia's first surveyor, Lieutenant Augustus Alt, was an Army officer of the 8th (The King's) Regiment of Foot, which arrived in Australia with the First Fleet in January 1788.Reilly, SE, Soldiers and Surveyors, 1983; The Australian Surveyor, March 1983, Vol 31, No 5, p 315 Eighteen years before him, Lieutenant James Cook, Royal Navy, used his knowledge and skills of topographic survey by plane-table for his surveys and charting of the east coast. This graphical method of topographic survey, first used before 1600, was the mainstay of the Australian Survey Corps for the first 20 years and used in the two world wars and occasionally much later. Cook had learned surveying in Canada from Royal Engineer Samuel Holland who then (1758) was the first Surveyor-General of British North America.Mundle, Rob Cook From Sailor to Legend Harper Collins Publishers, 2013
For 113 years after the arrival of the First Fleet, much of the mapping of Australia, mainly for colonial exploration, settlement and development, was supervised and conducted by naval and military officers. These officers included the well known explorers and surveyors: Captain Matthew Flinders, Royal Navy; Lieutenant William Dawes, (New South Wales); Lieutenant Philip Parker King, Royal Navy (mainly Tasmania, Western Australia and Northern Territory), Lieutenant John Oxley, Royal Navy, (New South Wales); Lieutenant Colonel Sir Thomas Mitchell (New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland); Captain Charles Sturt (New South Wales and South Australia); Lieutenant John Septimus Roe, Royal Navy (Western Australia), and Colonel William Light (South Australia).
After 100 years of settlement some topographic maps had been produced for both public and private use but only a few maps were of any real military utility. The colonial part-time Defence Forces prepared small-area training manoeuvre maps and some colonies had produced small systematic topographic surveys for defence of the main ports of trade and commerce in the 1880s and 1890s. That is not to say that the need for topographic mapping was not a government and public concern but there were only minor attempts to allocate appropriate public resources.Lines, John D Australia on Paper – The Story of Australian Mapping, Fortune Publications, 1992,
After Federation in 1901, the Defence Act 1903 made provision for military survey but nothing was immediately done to address the matter. Most recently a royal commission into the way the British Army had conducted itself in South Africa (Boer War) found that the troops had to fight without adequate topographic information. Indeed, accurate maps of the Boer republics did not exist. The Times' history of the Boer War 1899–1902 included: 'The chief deduction to be made in the matter is that no efforts during a war will compensate for the lack of a proper topographical survey made in peace time. Maps are a necessity to a modern army, and the expense of making them is very small compared with the cost of a campaign.'Amery, The Times History of the War in South Africa 1899–1902, vol 6, p350
In early 1907, Colonel William Bridges then Chief of Intelligence and the senior Australian military officer recommended to Defence Minister Sir Thomas Ewing, member for Richmond, New South Wales, that a Chief of the General Staff should be appointed in place of Chief of Intelligence and that a General Staff be established. The Minister, who was a licensed surveyor, was unimpressed by the advice preferring to continue for the time being with the arrangements of a Military Board. He was concerned that there were no plans for mobilisation, or local defence, noting that "there were few reliable maps, even of the most important localities".
These were the important national defence issues that Ewing recommended to Bridges for his immediate attention.Mordike, J, An Army for a Nation, 1992, Allen and Unwin, p 193 The Department of Defence and the Government considered a number of options to address the important and urgent need for a military survey, finally deciding in late 1907 to raise the Australian Intelligence Corps (AIC) manned by part-time Citizen Military Force (CMF) officers who were trained in surveying or draughting and whose duties included the preparation of strategic and tactical maps and plans. In Victoria the military survey was the responsibility of Lieutenant-Colonel John Monash who was then the senior AIC militia officer in the 3rd Military District.
By 1909 the limitations of this arrangement were evident, and after advice from a senior British Army Royal Engineer Survey Officer, it was decided to embark on a systematic military survey conducted full-time by a Survey Section, Royal Australian Engineers (RAE) (Permanent Forces), allotted for duty under the supervision of the AIC. The Section was to be commanded by an Australian survey officer and staffed by Australian warrant officer draughtsmen and non-commissioned officers (NCO) topographers and four NCO topographers on an initial two-year loan from the British Army Royal Engineers.
The Royal Engineer topographers (Corporal Lynch, Lance-Corporals Barrett, Davies and Wilcox) arrived in Melbourne on 11 April 1910 and on 16 April 1910, draughtsman Warrant Officer John J Raisbeck was the first Australian appointed to the Survey Section and soon after he was joined by draughtsman Warrant Officer Class 1 George Constable. Raisbeck was a survey draughtsman from the Department of Mines, Bendigo, and a Second-Lieutenant in the CMF 9th Light Horse Regiment. He relinquished his commission to enlist in the Permanent Military Forces. He was granted the Honorary rank Second-Lieutenant and was retired with the rank Lieutenant-Colonel 33 years later at age 63 years having served in France in World War I and in World War II. Fitzgerald said that JJ Raisbeck was the 'pioneer of military mapping in Australia'.
The first officer appointed to the position Lieutenant Survey Section RAE (Permanent) was Lieutenant William Lawrence Whitham, a licensed surveyor from South Australia, having been highly recommended by the Surveyor-General South Australia. He assumed his appointment on 1 July 1910 at which time there were seven members of the Section. All men were professional surveyors and draftsman. CMF officers of the AIC in the Military District Headquarters supervised the work of the Section. In 1912 the Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia State Governments each agreed to loan a Lands Department Survey Officer to the Survey Section RAE for two years to supervise the work of the Section in each State. Each Survey Officer was a militia officer in the AIC. The Section was divided into two sub-sections and employed in New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia producing scale one-mile-to-one-inch military maps ('one-mile' map) mainly of areas around cities and key infrastructure.
By mid-1913 the Section had completed topographic field sheets by plane-tabling for eight maps around Newcastle, Melbourne and Canberra. The initial method of using parish plans to position the topographic detail was soon found to be inadequate and a geodetic subsection was established in 1914 to provide surveys by geodetic triangulation as spatial frameworks for the field sheets produced by the topographers. The triangulation work started at Werribee south-west of Melbourne and proceeded west along the coast to Warrnambool. This work included the 1860 Geodetic Survey of Victoria where appropriate – much of which was produced by Royal Engineer officers. The AIC was disbanded in 1914 but the work of the Survey Section continued under the supervision and control of the Intelligence Section of the General Staff under the general direction of the Chief of the General Staff (CGS).Sargent, Clem, Lieutenant-Colonel RA Svy, 1990, The Royal Australian Survey Corps 1915–1990Royal Australian Survey Corps Association Bulletin 1965 to 1989School of Military Survey,1985, The Chronology of RA Svy Corps, Edition 2
First World War The outbreak of the First World War on 4 August 1914 did not, at first, seriously affect the work of the members of the Section as the highest priority and urgent work of the Permanent Forces was military survey for defence of the major cities and ports in Australia. Indeed, the Section gained an increase in personnel and equipment.Quinlan, Cecil Verdon, Major, Survey Section RAE 1913–15, Australian Map Makers, The Australian Surveyor, 1 September 1943 At that stage it was understood that the British Army would provide the maps required for the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) war fighting. However, by 17 August the Draughting sub-Section of the Survey Section RAE in Melbourne had prepared a map of the north-east frontier of France for reproduction of 1,000 copies by photo-lithography by the Victorian Lands Department for issue to the Australian Imperial Force.Chief of the General Staff War Diary 17 August 1914 – Letter to Secretary of the Department of Lands, Victoria