The New South Wales private property frontier
From the end of the 1780s, the colonial government of New South Wales began to turn parcels of the 1770 Crown land claim into plots, large and small, of private property. With support from the Henry Halloran Research Trust and the Australian Research Data Commons, the Private Property Frontier is testing the means by which a large-scale study of the pattern and pace of that process – that is, alienation – took place over time.
Contributing to the Time-Layered Cultural Map of Australia, the pilot study explores the history of land alienation over a series of parishes in New South Wales. When and where was land first considered to be in private hands? What did that privatisation entail? How was it mediated? And what did it allow? The research begins with the observation that the history of Australian architecture is also a history of the relationship between what we build and where we build. Using the tools of the digital humanities, it offers a spatialised account of an important aspect of Australian history – at the intersection of governance, law, architecture, and culture.
Project team
- Andrew Leach - Professor of Architecture, University of Sydney
- Dallas Rogers - Associate Professor in Urbanism, University of Sydney
- Amelia Thorpe - Associate Professor in Law, UNSW
- Laurence Troy - Senior Lecturer in Urbanism, University of Sydney
- Jasper Ludewig - Lecturer in Architecture, The University of Newcastle
The project is funded through the Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Project (DP) scheme under the number DP240100395.