Book launch: Townsend of the Ranges by Peter Crowley

Lauren Smith: Good evening, everyone. Very warm welcome to the National Library of Australia and to this literary event, to those of you who have joined us here in the theatre, and also to those of you who are watching us online.

I'm Lauren Smith. I'm currently the Director of Community Engagement here at the Library. Before we kick off, I would like to acknowledge Australia's First Nations people, the First Australians as the traditional owners and custodians of this land, and give my respect to their elders past and present and through them to all Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. I also want to acknowledge the traditional owners and custodians of the land on which this story was written and took place, many, many of the nations across the southeast of Australia.

We are very proud this evening to be launching officially Townsend of the Ranges by Dr Peter Crowley. I have the great privilege in my regular role here at the library of being the publisher. We loved this story from the moment that we read it.

Today, a reviewer commented in a review that they published how they were surprised that the biography of a surveyor could contain such depth, and that is also how we felt when we had the chance to read it in a manuscript. Another reviewer has said that Peter has the voice of a scholarly storyteller, which you will all hear tonight. He deftly, sensitively and romantically I've always said, tells the story of Thomas Scott Townsend, an enigmatic and often forgotten figure from Australian history.

Thomas Scott Townsend joined the Surveyor General's department in New South Wales as a draughtsman in 1831, aged just 18. By the end of his career, Townsend had become one of the greatest of all surveyors who mapped the wild Australian Alps. He was the first European to identify the source of the Murray River and to traverse the main range of the Snowy Mountains.

And in 1847, he stood on the summit of Mount Kosciuszko, quite possibly the first colonist to do so. These and other feats earned him the admiration of his superiors. The country's second highest mountain was named in his honour, and yet his career was barely noticed by the public during his lifetime.

Today, the role that he played in the colonisation of southeastern Australia is largely forgotten. But Dr Peter Crowley spent over five years researching Townsend in archives throughout Australia and in the United Kingdom in order to correct that. In the book, Peter is careful to chart not just Townsend's experiences, but also those of the people of the Aboriginal nations that he passed through and worked with. Acknowledging that Townsend's mapping represented also the encroaching settlement moving deeper into the country.

We are delighted tonight to be joined by the author, Dr Peter Crowley, to discuss his debut book. Peter is a medical doctor, a fellow of the Royal College of Pathologists of Australasia and historical researcher. He attended school in Gippsland and lived for several years in the Strzelecki Ranges, a place of steep hills, eerie mists, and occasional snowfalls.

He lives in Melbourne on Wurundjeri land with his wife Rasika, and he has two sons, Tom and Dan, all of whom are with us tonight. He feels most at home when he's close to the Yarra River. Tonight, Peter will be discussing his book in conversation with the ABC's national affairs correspondent, Melissa Clarke.

Melissa has reported on federal politics from Parliament House in Canberra for more than 15 years, specialising in environment, energy and climate change policy. But Melissa is also a lifelong alpine adventurer, having traversed the Australian Alps by bush walking, back country skiing, trail running, and mountain biking. Please join me in welcoming Peter and Melissa to the stage to discuss Townsend of the Ranges.

Melissa Clarke: Thank you, Peter. It really is an honour to be able to have this conversation with you as someone who has spent a lot of time in the mountains, having had the benefits of the work of Thomas Scott Townsend. Without even knowing, it's wonderful to have been able to read this book and learn all about his contribution, because I think many people would be like me and would only know the name Townsend from Mount Townsend. So, I just want to start by asking you about this geographical feature that bears the name of this unheralded surveyor. Tell me about this mountain.

Peter Crowley: Sure. Well, I can't show you a portrait of Townsend himself because there's not one in existence that we know of, but I can describe his mountain for you. So, a second highest mountain in Australia comes a very close second to Mount Kosciuszko. The two of them are almost the same height. They're separated from one another by the length of a cricket pitch. In fact, there's an old joke among bushwalkers apparently that if everybody who climbed to the top of Townsend deposited another boulder on top of it, it would eventually be the highest mountain in-

Melissa Clarke: It's true. I can attest to that. It wouldn't take much.

Peter Crowley: ... in Australia, and it's about four kilometres away. So, we're in Canberra, so everybody here will have been to the top of Mount Kosciuszko more than once, I'm sure. If you look to the north of Kosciuszko and slightly out to the west, you'll see a rocky ridge. And at the summit of that ridge is a conical pile of rocks, a pinnacle of rocks, and that's Mount Townsend. It's separated from Kosciuszko by a great sweeping valley known as the Wilkinson Valley, but it looks quite different to Kosciuszko. Kosciuszko is really...

Melissa Clarke: It's a bit of a mound, not to talk down, not to talk down our highest mountain, but it's a fairly unassuming summit.

Peter Crowley: It is an unassuming summit, whereas Townsend is really dominates the heights I think in a way that Kosciuszko doesn't. And has this extraordinary view down into along ravines that sweep down to the Geehi River, the highest relief on the Australian continents, which I understand you've walked that route probably three times I think?

Melissa Clarke: Yeah. At least two times up. Hannels Spur coming from the western side. The western fall of the main range is really one of the most extraordinary places in Australia, but I can't imagine walking it before anyone else had or any other maps had been made of it. Although of course our Indigenous First Nations people had certainly traversed that space beforehand.

Peter Crowley: Absolutely. So, that's Mount Townsend. So, it's about four kilometres away from Kosciuszko, but in clear view from the summit. There's nothing else in the way you can look at it.

Melissa Clarke: Absolutely. Like much of the main range, very open territory. So, how did the man who this mountain is named after, how did he come into your life? How did he work his way into your mind and occupy many years of your study and research? How did you come onto the story of Thomas Scott Townsend?

Peter Crowley: Another member of our family for a while now have to exorcise his ghost from the house. I was doing some, I became interested after, my father died in 2015. He was a Gippslander. That's where I went to school. And I found a book in his study just called 'The Settling of Gippsland' by a local historian called Patrick Morgan. And then I found some other Gippsland books. Gippsland has the most incredible community of local historians. They're just a remarkable group of people talking about people like Linda Barraclough, who's an author of local history and other people. And I was hooked.

So, what really interested me was the early colonial period in Gippsland, so the early 1840s and a period where there was a lot of frontier violence directed by settlers toward the Gunaikurnai. And I joined up with a team from Swinburne Media to make a documentary on an indigenous frontier massacre at Warrigal Creek as a historical consultant and just helped them out on site.

And while I was reading about early Gippsland, the name Townsend came up, and he fairly warranted a footnote in the sources that I was reading. He was the first government official of any kind into Gippsland, and he was the first surveyor, he was a surveyor of Port Albert, which was Gippsland's early maritime capital.

So, like everyone else, when I hear the word surveyor, I started nodding off. But no disrespect to surveyors. In those things when I say surveyor, I think explorer and cartographer because he was those things as well.

And then it was just a complete accident just by an exercise in idle curiosity, I started wondering about, the way my mind works, the border between Victoria and New South Wales, and particularly the straight line section of the border that runs from the source of the Murray to Cape Howe on the coast.

Melissa Clarke: So, for anyone who hasn't looked closely at their Australian map for quite a while, we have the Murray River as the border except for where we get to the source of the Murray, and then it's a straight line to the Cape.

Peter Crowley: Exactly. And I just wondered in case it ever came up in a pub trivia competition.

Melissa Clarke: Pub trivia, very motivating, very motivating.

Peter Crowley: Did it have a name, and it did have a name. It was called the Black-Allan Line and named after the two surveyors who laid it out on the ground in the 1870s, early 1870s. Remarkable feat, the survey. But that didn't quite make sense because Australia had separated from, sorry, Victoria had separated from New South Wales.

Melissa Clarke: You're a Victorian, so you'll be forgiven for conflating Victoria with Australia.

Peter Crowley: My world stops at the Murray. And so, somebody must have identified the starting point of the Black-Allan Line, or at least approximated it before the 1870s. And that information proved very difficult to get. But that name Townsend came up as the surveyor who had actually located that and approximated that line.

And that meant that guy Townsend was probably the fellow who had been the first European to locate the source of the Murray at Indi Springs. So, there was another tick-off trivia who was the first European to identify the source of the Murray, which I didn't know. And then I was just, this was harder. I had to force myself to extend my geographical horizons beyond the Murray. So, I started teaching myself about the lie of the land in the Snowy Mountains.

Melissa Clarke: This is a lot of effort to win pub trivia.

Peter Crowley: Yeah. Well, that's how it started. And I thought, well, I know Kosciuszko is the highest mountain in Australia. I lived in Kosciuszko Street, Traralgon when I was a child.

Melissa Clarke: Oh, that's a nice connection.

Peter Crowley: Yeah. Before we moved to the Strzelecki Ranges. So, these names were always around. And the second highest mountain in Australia turned out to be Townsend. So, his name had come up at three places. So, I suppose to borrow a survey metaphor, I did an exercise in triangulation. I just asked, "Was this the same Townsend?" And it was the same Townsend.

So, then I was curious about him, so I do what you do. I Googled him and drew a blank essentially. No entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography. Nothing in Wikipedia. Very little had been written about him. There'd been a scholarly article by Alan Andrews, who's a brilliant Snowy Mountains historian, who's unfortunately no longer with us. And he regretted not being able to find any personal biographical information about Townsend.

And the stuff that was being tossed around in various sources was folkloric. No one could give me his date of birth or where he came from or who his family was. There was no known portrait of him. He made himself a really difficult person for historians to locate.

And I was just intrigued by this. How could the person after whom Australia's second highest mountain is named be such a mystery? Some people said that he had red hair and a beard, but we can't, like my father did incidentally, but we can't really confirm that. He was said to have had a very excitable temperament. Some people said he came from a very rich family in England and that he was heir to a fortune and that he was somehow connected to Belvoir Castle in Leicestershire because a 19th century name for Wodonga was Belvoir. So, that was trace to Townsend.

Melissa Clarke: A lot of connections being drawn without necessarily information behind it.

Peter Crowley: And someone said he died badly. That something had happened to him before he left Australia. Someone else had written that he'd lived to happy the old age and-

Melissa Clarke: Conclusive not.

Peter Crowley: Yeah. I just became obsessed in a very short space of time.

Melissa Clarke: There's a line in your book I think that sums up quite well. You wrote that 'his career was a series of hard-won triumphs, but failures were more likely to attract the public's attention than competent successors, particularly if they involve tragedy.' I mean there's probably some public servants or former public servants in the office who might readily recognise with that.

But there has been a lot of research done on some of the glorious failures of early explorers and expeditioners. Think of our polar explorers Ernst Shackleton or Robert Scott, of which you would have no trouble finding mountains of information. And given the breadth of the work that you went to discover that Townsend had undertaken, it is surprising nonetheless that he hasn't had the profile that others of his time had.

Peter Crowley: It's incredibly surprising and I think part of the explanation for that relates to the way he died, which is the material for the first chapter of my book. He didn't die a heroic death in the wilderness or died by a river. He died in a boarding house in London in the late 1860s, in 1869. And it wasn't a happy story.

Melissa Clarke: It's a very dramatic opening to the book. I might get you to read from some of that, if that's all right. I don't know if you've got the section marked out there or I have on my copy, which is also very flagged. But it's a very, we're not giving anything away because this is very early on in the book, so this isn't a spoiler, but I think this speaks to how extraordinary this story is for the many different facets that come to the man. So, perhaps read this section for us, if you will.

Peter Crowley: Sure. So, this is from chapter one, 'Death of a Surveyor'.

'They were too late. Townsend had not waited for the arrival of his final meal. He laid dead on the floor of his bedroom, having removed his jacket and waistcoat before cutting his throat with a knife. The weapon lay under his left shoulder. There were two cuts on his neck, a small superficial incision, a tentative gesture signalling his intention and a long deep wound the cause of death extending from his left ear to his chin.

A piece of skin with facial hair attached had dropped onto a table. He had moved around the room in his final moments, dripping blood onto his bed and the floor in several places. Blood was also spattered on a mirror sprayed onto the glass as he looked at his reflection for the last time.'

Melissa Clarke: Now, if that doesn't make you intrigued to find out how this was the ending, I don't know what. If that doesn't get you into a book, I don't know what will. It's such an extraordinary finale to an extraordinary life. Can you tell us how you came across this information about his life? Because the research for this book has been really interesting and I think that being one of the really interesting accounts and one of the more definitive bits of information we have about his life. Tell us about finding out about the matter in which he died.

Peter Crowley: So, being a pathologist, I immediately went looking for the inquest proceedings and I found them in the National Archives of the United Kingdom in London. I'm not sure given Townsend's obscurity, whether anybody had ever looked at them before but I located them. And I found the story of an inquest, including some, a quasi-transcript of the evidence that was taken by Coroner William John Payne. And that description's actually drawn from witness testimony that was given by the members of his family who were around.

By that time sadly, his family was dying out. There weren't many of them left. And those who came together to deal with the formalities of death didn't really, they couldn't add very much to the story. They were all scratching their heads and thinking, "Well, he was a surveyor in Australia." That's all they could say. "And we heard that he was overworked in the bush," but that's really all they could say. He was estranged from his family because of a severe mental illness that had overtaken him before he left Australia.

And that was a key primary source that really allowed me to construct that first part of that part and very sad part of the story. The other thing, sometimes you get lucky, a letter dropped out of the inquest notes and the letter was written by a man who had known Townsend in Australia and did know some of the background and the story. And he had arrived completely coincidentally in London a week before Townsend's death.

Melissa Clarke: Got to love a coincidence to help in historical research.

Peter Crowley: Yeah. So, he was laid up at the Green Dragon Hotel or something like that. I can't remember the name. And heard about the inquest and saw the notice of it in the Pell Mell Gazette and wrote a letter to the coroner about Townsend saying that he knew him well, that he was a surveyor in Australia. And that intense perseverance in his official duties had unsettled his mind. So, that was just even more encouragement to keep going deeper into the story.

Melissa Clarke: Yeah. Well, tell us about that intense personal endurance because the breadth of his work is fairly extraordinary. The amount of territory he covered in southeastern Australia at a time where there weren't established connections that would support his mode of transport, having bullocks and drays. Give us a sense of how hard he was worked in his roles over many a decade.

Peter Crowley: He is the classic example of the person whose story you learn and then you think how could we not possibly know this story? So, he was the most prolific surveyor of the southeastern mainland during the squatter age. So, we're talking 1830s, 1840s when there was this boom of pastoral expansion. And he, there was a folkloric comment that I came across in a letter that he could do the work of two men, any two men.And I thought that's the exaggeration of a storyteller.

In fact, it was emphatically confirmed by his correspondence. He walked thousands and thousands of miles laying out a blueprint for colonisation across southeastern Australia. He walked across plains. He walked across mountains.He crossed rivers. He drew the first maps of some of the most iconic country in Australia. Townsend drew the first map of, the first accurate map of Mount Kosciuszko. Townsend drew the first survey accurately measured map of the Snowy River. This was all of his work.

And he worked seriously hard in a career that lasted 20 years. He did it in all extremes of wind and weather. I mean, it is difficult to imagine the privation that he went through to do this because back in those days, if you're going to the mountains, you'll drop off at Kathmandu.

Melissa Clarke: I'll have a nice big puffy down jacket. I'll have a nice lightweight synthetic tent-

Peter Crowley: Yup, exactly.

Melissa Clarke: ... to keep me under shelter. And after a couple of days, I'll get to come back home and have a nice hot shower and a meal. He didn't get that.

Peter Crowley: No. He didn't get that. No. I mean he just had the usual woollen jacket and coat and off he went. And not only that, but because of the country he was surveying, particularly in the mountain country, he couldn't, the country was often too rugged to take beasts of burden. So, he couldn't take bullocks or even pack horses to carry his tents. So, for extended periods, he slept out in the open without bedding, without covering and how on earth he survived.

Melissa Clarke: With his equipment, drawing the maps as he went is fairly extraordinary.

Peter Crowley: Yeah. I mean the favourite Townsend map comes from, is a beautiful map that's in the book showing the Snowy River, the lowest Snowy River at the point where it crosses between Victoria and New South Wales. It's absolutely exquisite. He was just a fine craftsman and he drew that map. So, he took the measurements for that map while he was crossing the Great Dividing Range between Omeo and Monero Plain with bullocks. Oh, it's there. We actually have it. I'm sorry, I didn't realise that there were slides behind me.

Melissa Clarke: No. We were right to go.

Peter Crowley: That's Townsend's survey of the Snowy River, and you may be able to appreciate that he's even coloured in the water of the river blue. I just love that map. And I love it for a number of reasons. Sorry, I've probably gone off on a slight tangent here, Mel, but you can also see down on the lower left there, Townsend meticulously recorded indigenous place names because he was under instructions from Thomas Mitchell to do so. All of the surveyors were.

So, there's a name down there for the Snowy River that I haven't been able to find outside of Townsend's maps [unclear] for the Snowy, which I absolutely love. So, when he encountered the Snowy, it was in the middle of winter. And when he got to Monero, which is up there on the upper right, the conditions were miserable. And he wrote to Thomas Mitchell, the surveyor general of New South Wales apologising for the fact that that map was taking so long to create because the snow and the sleet kept blowing into his tent and his ink kept freezing on his plotting table.

So, that is the first surveyed map ever drawn of the Snowy River, and it was drawn by Thomas Scott Townsend, and it's published for the first time in my book. It's just been sitting in an archive for all of these years without actually seeing the light of day.

Melissa Clarke: And it's not just this beautiful map, it's the upper parts of the Murray and Murrumbidgee Rivers. It's the Riverina area. It is Gippsland. It is western Victoria. That's a huge geographical area.

Peter Crowley: It's vast.

Melissa Clarke: It is vast. It is varied. The terrain is different in many ways. There's a point where he's quite struggling with the heat in the Riverina area. But at the same time dealing with snow in the winter in the mountains, which at that time would've been much more severe than the snow levels we see now. We know even 150 years ago, you would see snowfalls that are regularly twice as much as we get now over the course of winter. So, he really had all the extremes of the climate, huge range of terrain.

I just want to list through some of the towns that he also surveyed to set down for the first time. Because as I was reading through the book, I was like, "Oh, he set out and found the location and set out the plan for Albury and Okuma as well, and Eden and Port Albert and parts of Melbourne," and a million others I haven't mentioned.

Peter Crowley: It's a long list of those.

Melissa Clarke: It's a very long list that I think for Canberra, we know about the planning that went into place to have Canberra as a city that Walter Burley Gryphon and his wife Marion. And it's a really prominent part of Canberra's history and I think very well known. That Townsend's role was instrumental in the formation of so many townships that hasn't been known at all.

Peter Crowley: Absolutely. And the first two towns he laid out were quite close to here. Yass and Gunning were numbers one and two because when he was in 1836, a young man, he was desperate to prove himself in what was referred to as the field. And his first assignment was to the southern highlands. And he acted on instructions, as well as running around and marking out pastoral properties. He laid out the towns of Yass and Gunning and this is the way it worked in those days. While he was in Yass, he received a letter from his boss, Samuel Perry, which I think we might have. It's part of the NLA collection. Here it is.

So, the National Library of Australia has a large collection of Townsend's letters, mostly in the John Ferguson collection. And this is a copy of the instructions that were sent to Townsend on the 5th of July 1838, telling him to take himself off from the Yass Plains down to where the Port Phillip Road crossed the river and to lay out a town and that town would become Albury. So, that sounds like just a really straightforward assignment.

Melissa Clarke: Remind me not to complain. I get an email from my boss asking me to write a story about something. Just go down to the river at the junction and find a place to set out a town is a pretty big task.

Peter Crowley: The background for this letter, and you may notice that in the book, I sometimes quote marginal notes. Marginal notes in official correspondence are the best fun because they all used to sling off at one another in marginal notes. Here's one of them. For instance, when Townsend applied for job in the Surveyor General's department in 1831, Thomas Mitchell wrote this letter saying, "Oh, yes, yes, it's all sorted out. Yes, I know this man and it's all under control.

I don't need to be told how to do my job."

And in the margin, he said to David Duncan, who was the chief clerk, "have not sent in a letter in favour of Mr. Townsend". TM is Thomas Mitchell. "Not yet", TD. So, I love these marginal notes. They give a very human dimension to what was actually going on.

Melissa Clarke: Well, it's also fascinating that you have been able to construct so much of his life from what is really bureaucratic communication. I mean, you have been able to trace the breadth and extent of his work because you have been able to see what is the paperwork of the time for his work.

Peter Crowley: Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. And could I go back to the letter? One of the things that was being argued about in the margins was whether Townsend could be sent a horse because his horse had drowned in a river. It was a replacement animal that had drowned the first night it reached him. And he delayed going to Albury because without a horse, without a pack horse, he couldn't carry a tent or tents, which means that his men would have to sleep, his convict labourers would have to sleep out in the open on the Murray. And in fact, the horse didn't turn up and Townsend set off without it.

So, the Murray survey was very hard. He first, in order to identify the best site for town, he had to trace 50 miles of river through lacerating scrub. And a lot of his men became unwell with fever. And then finally, he got around to deciding where to put the town, and he laid out the first five sections of the town of Albury. Although he didn't call it Albury, he called it Bungambrawatha. The name Albury doesn't appear in his report and it doesn't appear on his map of Albury. He suggested the town should be named really by its indigenous name.

Melissa Clarke: I think we will come back to this. This is a repeated theme throughout the book, but while we're talking about some Canberra connections and we're talking about what you've been able to discover through letters, things on margins, I do want to come back to one particular letter, one item that was part of the National Library collection here that was a letter from Townsend's mother-in-law, and this really changed what you got to know about Townsend and helped round out the story of that we alluded to earlier, the very dramatic end to the story of town Townsend's life.

This helped bridge the gap between his life as a surveyor and this very dramatic end to his life. Tell me about this letter.

Peter Crowley: Sure. We can flick through and show you. Keep going. There. Okay. The last chapter in my book, 'The End of All Surveys', was would not have been written in the way it was without the assistance of the Canberra Local History Community. Townsend married a woman called Frances Emily Davis, who was a member of the Davis family of Queanbeyan and Ginninderra, who were Canberra pioneers, I now know.

But I was having difficulty. She was very important to the story without giving away any spoilers, and I was having trouble locating her. And [unclear] kept saying to me that she didn't think the book was finished. "Can you find out more about Frances Emily Davis?" So, I sent out a call for help to the Queanbeyan Historical Museum who got back to me and said, "Oh, yeah, we'll send it out. I'll forward this to the usual suspects."

One of those usual suspects is in the audience tonight. Her name is Marilyn Folger. She's a local historian who works through the Halls School Museum and Marilyn educated me about Frances Emily Davis and about that family. And she alerted me two very important things and one of them was this letter. So, this letter, I don't quite sure how to describe it without how far I should go into.

Melissa Clarke: Without giving it away. Well, that's also prerogative. So, you can give away as much or as little as you like. If you don't want to give away too much, maybe just tell us about the process of stitching together the family connections, or if you want to give it away, that's okay. Give away a bit of a spoiler.

Peter Crowley: I suppose it's probably no secret given the way Townsend's life ended, that his career came to a catastrophic ending because of a mental illness. And his mental illness affected his wife in a very particular way and manifested shortly after they were married.

And it was that series of events that terminated Townsend's career and that led to him being put on a boat back to London by his friends because he was in a terrible danger of being confined for lunacy in Sydney. But actually, there's nothing more priceless than a source that takes you inside a family that's going through a tragedy like that.

And Emily's story, the story of their marriage was deeply tragic and caused a lot of shame for her in the district. She was the subject of malicious gossip and was raising Townsend's son at the time as well. The two of them had had a child together before Townsend went back to England in 1854. So, anyway, Marilyn told me that Emily's, I call her Emily, she was known as Emily within her family and full name was Frances Emily Davis.

Melissa Clarke: Townsends are now part of your family after this research.

Peter Crowley: Yeah. They are.

Melissa Clarke: So, I think that's fair to say.

Peter Crowley: Yeah. I feel related. Yes. Emily's mother, Jane Weston, who married a man named Davis, had written a letter that referred to the catastrophe that overtook the two of them shortly after Townsend's and Emily's marriage at St. John's in Canberra was where they were married. And this is the letter it's quoted at length in the book. It's absolutely heartrendingly sad when she talks about what happened to the two of them. And I still find it quite difficult to read without getting emotional. And it was in the National Library of Australia. So, I was able to incorporate it into the book.

And she talks about Emily and the son and because there was no portrait of Townsend, there's a line in this letter that I thought was just absolutely extraordinary, said, that Townsend's son was named after him. He was Thomas Scott Townsend, Jr. And she says when he was about 10 that he's the apple of his mother's eye and he's the spitting image of his father. She said, "To look at one is to look at the other." And so, of course then Marilyn followed up with a picture of Thomas Scott Townsend, Jr. and Frances Emily Davis, which I think was the slide just before. And there they are.

So, keep these things in mind when you are reading the last chapter, which is not easy reading, it's very confronting. It was confronting to write it. It's hard to read, I think because this family suffered terribly in my opinion, because Townsend was worked into a state of complete madness. He actually wanted to go home in 1847 and applied for leave.

Melissa Clarke: Like many a time wasn't granted.

Peter Crowley: Yeah. Well, not granted. So, what did they do? They didn't say, "Okay, you sit at a desk for a while." They sent him off to survey the entire Murrumbidgee squatting district.

Melissa Clarke: Just that small area.

Peter Crowley: This enormous tract of land between the Snowy Mountains and outermost extremity of the Riverina, the Murray flood plain. So, that's where he spent his last years. My book is actually the first account of his surveying in the Murrumbidgee district. It's never been covered before, which I'm pleased to be able to present.

Melissa Clarke: You should be very proud. It also gives a really good account of how Thomas Scott Townsend was very mindful of the First Nations people who inhabited the land beforehand. He was conscious of taking down names where he could find them. But it's also clear in the book that it's important to you that that part of this history is acknowledged. Tell me why you wanted to make sure that the lens of a First Nations inhabitants of the land and sovereignty of the land was something that you wanted to acknowledge and address in writing about a colonist.

Peter Crowley: Yeah. Look, that indigenous history in Australia has been an interest of mine for a long time. I did some work on Gippsland frontier violence and here I was proposing to thinking about writing a book about a surveyor. And surveyors, let's face it, they were part of the mechanism of colonisation. They were the cog in the wheel. I mean, they were the ones that were out there acquiring geographic knowledge, working out which towns, which parts of the country were suitable to be reserved for towns.

Melissa Clarke: Physical acquisition of land on the administrative orders of ideas.

Peter Crowley: Exactly. So, I mean Australia was settled by seizure and the surveyors were really the key mechanism for rolling out the British system of land tenure across indigenous lands right across the country. And Townsend was the most prolific surveyor during the squatting age. So, from 1835 to 1850 when pastoral expansion just boomed in the southeast, Monaro filled up with squatters and the river Indi. Melbourne was established in 1835 and squatters flooded into the western district. Gippsland in 1839, 1840.

Townsend just kept finding himself in the wrong place at the wrong time really, and was the first surveyor to measure a road across Gippsland. And so, the intensity of frontier violence was huge at that time, particularly in Gippsland.

I mean the story of frontier violence in Gippsland occupies a reasonable chunk of the book because it was particularly harrowing. And it's a story that can't be told often enough. These terrible events took place a couple of hours drive to the east of Melbourne. So, these were always in my mind when I was thinking about Townsend's story.

So, I simply couldn't write a book that colluded in the myth of Terra Nullius. He was out there happily laying out farms without actually dealing with this. And I mean, Lauren mentioned that Townsend's book is romantic, and I think that really hit the nail on the head. 'Townsend of the Ranges' is a conscious mimicking of Banjo Paterson's, Clancy of the Overflow. That's what I had in mind when I named the book. And I love that literature. It goes back Australian bush romantic literature.

Melissa Clarke: It's hard not to love. It's a big part of our cultural fabric, but it's only one part.

Peter Crowley: Yeah. And I was force-fed that stuff by my father who loved it. He thought it was the absolute pinnacle of world literature, Banjo Paterson. So, I agree to love it as well. But that literature is just separated from what was really going on to the frontier by a firewall really. I mean, it doesn't touch on any of the stories that I really wanted to tell about indigenous frontier violence as well.

So, I decided I would try and spin a campfire yarn, which blended both stories. And it took a long time for me to work out how to actually do that in a way that was, to entwine those two stories and to roll them out in parallel in a way that didn't seem token. And that took a long time. It took a long time to work out how to tell that story.

But that is an integral part of the book. A lot of the book is about interweaving Townsend's story with what was actually happening on the [unclear].

Townsend, he's a hero to me. I mean, he's an extraordinary man, an extraordinary figure, and he deserves to be revered in Australian history. But he was working at a time when indigenous dispossession was particularly intense. And so, that had to be part of the story.

Melissa Clarke: It's context that can't be overlooked.

Peter Crowley: Not these days. I mean who could write a book like that these days? I mean really, I think it would just be immoral to write the story of a colonial surveyor who was engaged in confiscating land without actually telling the story of what was going on, on the other side of the frontier.

Melissa Clarke: You're certainly not shying away from engaging in some of the small controversies in this realm if I can say the questions of who was the first European to step foot on the highest mountain in Australia, or should Mount Kosciuszko be given an indigenous name or be recognised by an indigenous name? I think these are discussions that are had over many a campfire or in many a mountain hut amongst walkers even today. I'd love you to express some of your thoughts on those, on both of those issues.

Peter Crowley: Am I still mic'd? Melissa Clarke:

Yes.

Peter Crowley: Okay. Sorry. I just heard a lot of crackling. So, firstly, I might just say to my wife, I told you this was going to come after that at some point.

Melissa Clarke: It can't be avoided in-

Peter Crowley: It can't be avoided.

Melissa Clarke: ... research in this realm, I'm afraid.

Peter Crowley: Yeah. So, Thomas Scott Townsend performed the first traverse survey of the main range, and I'm not sure if I have a map of that. And this was in 1847.

Melissa Clarke: Not that one.

Peter Crowley: I don't think I bought the main range map.

Melissa Clarke: That's alright.

Peter Crowley: And so, he was really the first to draw an accurate map of the position of Mount Kosciuszko. And we know that on February the 13th, 1847, he and his men stood on the top of Kosciuszko. There's no doubt at all that they were there. None at all. They were surveyers. They draw a map to show exactly where they were standing. They took their survey line straight over the top of the mountain. So, then I thought, "Oh, no."

Melissa Clarke: You have to confront this issue.

Peter Crowley: There's something else I'm going to have to confront now, because is it possible that Townsend. This is contested space, can I say? And there has been an argument since the early days as to whether Paul Strzelecki, a Polish explorer and adventurer who's usually given credit with being the first to summit Mount Kosciuszko in March 1840 was actually on the highest point in Australia or not. And there's some opinion that says that he was actually standing on Mount Townsend.

Melissa Clarke: You can see how that might happen when we were describing Mount Townsend and Mount Kosciuszko earlier.

Peter Crowley: Oh, thank you.

Melissa Clarke: We were describing the two mountains earlier and how one looks a little more like a peak than the other, and they are a very, very similar height. So, even being on the ground, you might consider that's a possibility.

Peter Crowley: Exactly. And there was a local mountain tradition that in fact, Mount Townsend was the real Mount Kosciuszko. In fact, the local guides used to take visitors to Mount Townsend rather than up to Mount Kosciuszko. And I thought, "Oh, what am I going to do with this?" So, I had to look into the-

Melissa Clarke: You look pained even now.

Peter Crowley: Into the sources of Strzelecki's ascent of Kosciuszko. And I think that even historians very firmly in Strzelecki's corner and Alan Andrews is someone I respect enormously would be an example of that. He thinks it's very likely that Strzelecki got on top of Mount Kosciuszko, but can't be absolutely sure.

So, why is there uncertainty? It's because of Strzelecki himself. He left very weak documentation of his ascent. He definitely got onto the main range. But which mountain did he climb? Strzelecki's account doesn't really clarify it. He didn't build a can on the summit. There was no local stockman accompanying him who could come back and tell a story to everybody sitting around the campfire. He says, point to the mountain and say, "Yeah, that's where."

Melissa Clarke: How reliable are those accounts anyway? Stockman's exploits in the mountains might well be exaggerated at any given time.

Peter Crowley: Yes, absolutely. And then he most annoyingly at all, he produced a map, a copy of which is in the NLA, which is historically of enormous importance, but it wasn't particularly detailed with respect to the main range. So, you can't tell from the map which mountain he climbed. There's insufficient detail and the scale of the map is too small. So, nobody can say from that.

So, that is, I regard him as the primary source for the ascent. I mean, I don't want to drag the audience into the weeds and talk about a man named James MacArthur and his account, but I think sometimes in history, you've just got to embrace the mystery.

And I think with the first ascent, Strzelecki's ascent of the main range, we're just dealing with something that's right at the limits of our sources. And I don't think we can convince ourselves that, I don't think we can say with complete certainty which mountain he was on. It may well have been Kosciuszko, but it might've been Townsend.

And it gets complicated because, I'm sorry, I'm sitting the fence here and dreading the Q&A's about this question. But Strzelecki's own description, Melissa and I were talking about the view from Mount Kosciuszko at the beginning. Strzelecki's own account of where he was standing is a really good description of the view from the summit of Mount Kosciuszko. It's a really good description.

Melissa Clarke: Mount Townsend.

Peter Crowley: Mount Townsend. Beg your pardon.

Melissa Clarke: The view he describes from Kosciuszko lines up with the view that you actually see from Mount Townsend, which gives you that view over to the west.

Peter Crowley: Exactly. Thank you. I'm starting to fade out a bit. Exactly. So, those in defence of Strzelecki are major clues for in a famous paper just suggest ad-hoc hypothesis they say, or oh, Strzelecki must have been confused about the view. Yeah. Okay, and maybe. And then Alan Andrews said, "Well, Strzelecki was fond of poetic licence in his writing." So, even though he was on Kosciuszko, he just conflated all of this description. And maybe he did you know Strzelecki could write some pretty purple prose, but it still left us with this problem.

And then this idea is not original to me at all. You'll all be familiar with Elyne Mitchell, who wrote 'The Silver Brumby'.

Melissa Clarke: Extraordinary woman of the mountains.

Peter Crowley: Oh, absolutely. She knew the mountains as well as anyone since Townsend I would've thought. It probably even better than you, Melissa.

Melissa Clarke: Oh, very much so, very much so.

Peter Crowley: And she had done the Handel's Spur ascent of Townsend plenty of times. And she said there's absolutely no doubt in my mind that Strzelecki was standing on Mount Townsend. But I don't think that matter can be resolved on the basis of our sources. But it has implications for Townsend because if Strzelecki wasn't on the top of the mountain we know as Kosciuszko, then the first European known to have ascended Kosciuszko was Thomas Scott Townsend. There's no doubt about it. And we're completely sure that he was there. I mean, there is no doubt at all.

Melissa Clarke: He's moved records are meticulous of what he has surveyed.

Peter Crowley: So, that's an interesting thing, but that never gets. Do people bring that up in Hudson around campfires when they're talking about.

Melissa Clarke: I think I've heard much more campfire discussion about the, did they mess up the naming of Mount Townsend and Mount Kosciuszko and did the names get swapped? I think that story gets told many a time I handed down around the campfire.

Peter Crowley: Yeah. That's a bit of a myth and I explore that in the book. But here's the catch when the first person to put, as I said, to draw an accurate map of Kosciuszko's position was Townsend. But he didn't name it initially. It took him until a map of 1851 before he actually named Mount Kosciuszko and drum roll, did he put the map next to our Mount Townsend or next to Mount Kosciuszko? He put it smack bang next to Kosciuszko. And it's always appeared next to Kosciuszko. Sorry, the name Mount Kosciuszko has always appeared next to our Mount Kosciuszko.

Melissa Clarke: The highest.

Peter Crowley: Yeah. To the highest point on the main range. And it has on every single survey map to come out of New South Wales. I mean the Victorians made a couple of mistakes, which is why there's that confusion about the name. But it's always been where it is now that name on the basis of the New South Wales survey map. So, did Townsend know something that we don't, I mean why did he decide to take essentially to take Strzelecki's side and to put Mount Kosciuszko right next to the highest mountain? I don't know the answer to that. I suspect he just took it at face value. Strzelecki claimed again and again that he reached the highest peak. And I think Townsend after concluding his extensive surveys worked out that Mount Kosciuszko was higher and thought, "Oh, that must've been-"

Melissa Clarke: Therefore, this name goes with this mountain.

Peter Crowley: Exactly. I think it may have been, I looked really hard for any letters between Strzelecki and Townsend that might've been missed and I couldn't find anything. So, that remains something of a mystery.

Melissa Clarke: That's all right. It's good to have a mystery. It also provides a little intrigue to help people in. Look, we're getting near the end of our chat, but I do want to ask you one more question about the writing process, because you're not a professional writer or professional historian, you're a medical doctor. Tell me about how you found the process of writing a very extensive book and the publishing process. This has been a very new field for you. Tell us about your experiences of pulling together these words for this book and finding a publisher.

Peter Crowley: It was torture really. I think I'm not a natural writer. And every single sentence in that book has been written and rewritten a 100 times. I'm really the proverbial monkey that sits in front of the typewriter and bangs something out. And I just kept working away at it and working away at it. And for the first few years, I couldn't write anything that I didn't want to tear up and throw out.

Melissa Clarke: Very natural instinct. Very natural instinct. Not that I've written a book, but someone who writes every day, I generally detest most things that I write.

Peter Crowley: Yeah. But then all of a sudden, I don't know, three or four years in, I thought this is. And I had a couple of people helping me, Dr Andrew Dodd, a journalist from Melbourne University in Melbourne was one of my writing mentors. And he would offer constructive criticism about the writing. Eventually, I improved and I started writing things that I enjoyed to read and I like reading things aloud because I think of this book as really an extended campfire yarn.

So, my litmus test for whether a particular passage worked or not was if it worked out loud when I read it to my long-suffering family again and again and again. And when it started to work orally, then I was pleased with it. But it really took a long time. It was painful.

I think my skills as a doctor have involved some medical research. So, I think that transferred much more easily to the task of writing this book than did any aptitude for literary style, I really do. And the research was great fun. I had my share of eureka moments along the way, which were rewarding and which encouraged me.

Melissa Clarke: Keep you going through the long [inaudible 00:53:35].

Peter Crowley: Just one final observation. One thing I don't talk about at length in the book is how I'd discovered who Townsend's family were. And again, it was just dumb luck really. And looking at marginal notes and looking for when you're writing life of somebody who's, about whom very little is known, you have to really take whatever you're given and you have to look out for the small things.

And I came across a comment in a letter Thomas Mitchell wrote in 1832 to the colonial office saying that he'd just given a job to a young fellow called Thomas Scott Townsend, 'good fellow, bred in a survey office in England'. So, I thought, "Okay, I'm looking for somebody who belongs to a surveying family who has a relative who's a surveyor." So, I just went into the Library and just started pulling books on English surveying and English surveys. And one book was about the tithe commissioners of South East England.

Melissa Clarke: Absolutely scintillating work. I'm sure you can recommend it for anyone looking for a casual read.

Peter Crowley: They mentioned an assistant tithe's commissioner called Joseph Townsend, who worked in South East England. He was the master of Woodend House in Buckinghamshire. And he had a younger brother who went to Australia and worked as a surveyor, and his name was drum roll, Richard. I thought that has to be wrong, but that just has to be wrong.

So, I went chasing that Joseph Townsend out to the centre for Buckinghamshire studies, and they said they knew all about him and they said, "And here's a letter he wrote to his little brother when he was surveying out near some place called Yass." And his name was Thomas Scott Townsend. Snap. So, then I had the family in focus and they were actually quite well known and the rest of the story rolled out with some ease and comfort.

Melissa Clarke: That's a great eureka moment and maybe for any historians or amateur historians in the audience and know that those moments keep you going. Look, I've got a million more questions that I could ask, but I know we're also making sure we've got some time for the audience to ask some questions. So, Peter, thank you very much for giving us such a wonderful exploration of the work you've been able to pull together. I think we're really lucky to have been able to hear not only Thomas Scott Townsend story, but your story of discovering him. So, thank you.

Peter Crowley: Thanks, Melissa.

Melissa Clarke: Lauren.

Lauren Smith: Thank you, both. That was wonderful. And I could have listened for a lot longer. We do have a few minutes for questions now. I just will ask that you please wait for a microphone. That means that our online audience can hear your question as well and then understand the answer a little bit better. So, please feel to raise your hand if you've got a question.

Peter Crowley: I'm terrified of Q&A. I really am terrified.

Audience member 1: Thank you for a very interesting discussion. I'm wondering on that day and on the 13th of February in 1847 when they were on top of, I think it's Kosciuszko, is that, I don't know whether that's correct pronunciation but-

Melissa Clarke: Good Polish work.

Audience member 1: Anyhow, did they know at that instant that that was the highest point in continental Australia or was that back at the office? In other words, was there a eureka moment, so to speak, in that sense, or was that later?

Peter Crowley: Yeah. So, we don't know. I don't know when the survey department twigged to the fact that that was the highest mountain. And that's another way of putting that is just to say when did Townsend work out it was the highest mountain? Townsend didn't routinely record elevations on his maps. So, it just wasn't the way maps were done at that time. That came later. There were no contours on these maps.

And his field book is lost for this survey of the main range. So, I agonised over that point. It's actually an incredibly good question, but I couldn't work out when Townsend informed a view as he must have, that Kosciuszko was the highest mountain. I don't even know whether it was necessarily within the limits of error for measuring instruments of the day. I would have to ask a surveyor about that. It's beyond my competence really. But at some point, he must have decided that Kosciuszko was the highest point on the mainland.

And I think the evidence for that is that when the survey department who were very reluctant to accept the name Kosciuszko, I think they were saving them mountain up for the Duke of Wellington who died in 1852. And if you look at some of the maps that were published in Great Britain in the early '50s, they have Mount Kosciuszko and Mount Wellington as dual names, but I think in the end, they had quit. Thomas Mitchell probably wanted it named after himself.

But in the end, they rolled over and Kosciuszko appeared in 1851 next to our Mount Kosciuszko today. And it's been there ever since. But exactly when they formed a view that it was the highest, I'm sorry, I don't know. Great question.

Audience member 2: Thank you. Yes. You mentioned in your book that Townsend had with him in all his travels, quite a number of people, convicts, free people occasionally later on and probably some Aboriginal guides. He must have been extraordinarily good at people management. Would you like to comment on that?

Peter Crowley: That's a fantastic point. I used to marvel at that as well, particularly managing to get a team of irritable convicts across the Great Dividing Range in the middle of winter with a bullet tray that kept breaking down and not have any of them murder him or not mutiny sounds remarkable. And that theme comes up again and again in Townsend's surveys. I mean his impeccable leadership rescuing the Monaro survey operations when they fell in a hole before he arrived.

And I just used to marvel at him. He must have been really an excellent manager of people. One thing he did, some of the surveyors were more corporals than others when it came to dealing with their convict labour forces. Townsend used rewards for his surveys, sorry, the convict members of his party. So, those who performed well and who gave him good service were often recommended for pardons or conditional pardons or tickets of leave. And he did this regularly. There are many of these documents in Townsend's archive of him signing off on or recommending tickets of leave for his men.

And generally, Thomas Mitchell, Samuel Perry acquiesced in his to his request. So, there was really something in it for the men up to a point because the work they were doing was just so unpleasant. I mean, if Townsend was cold in the mountains, imagine the convicts. I mean, there are letters where he's complaining to Sydney about the fact that his men no longer have shoes. This is on Monaro in the winter.

And he was always willing to go into bat for his men in demand that they be properly equipped, but sometimes even these measures weren't enough. And he did have disciplinary problems with his men. There's a comment that I think in one of the letters that it's difficult to keep the men in line when the punishment is less severe than the work that they were being assigned to do.

And at one stage, he had men who were prepared to be on a mill for three months and follow him into the mountains and do surveying or join chain gangs. So, life was very hard for the surveys. The privation they suffered and which was magnified for the convicts is just hard to imagine. I mean, pity the poor convicts.

Melissa Clarke: I think there was another question up here. If we can get a microphone in the middle. Excellent.

Peter Crowley: Thank you for reading the book by the way.

Audience member 3: Quick question. You made mention of him being tasked by Mitchell to go out and survey the squattocracy to the west. So, in a question, I've not read the materials, but are those field notebooks replete with descriptions of farms and the names of the landholders and the markings for their particular holdings?

Peter Crowley: No, not particularly. Not in Townsend's archive. A lot of that hack work was actually done by contract surveyers who were answerable to Townsend. His own work in the Murrumbidgee was primarily directed at feature surveying. So, he had to trace the Murray, all those incredibly long anabranches of the western Riverina, Billabong Creek and the Edwards River and Tumble Creek. And it was job to do that so that he could recommend to the government reserves, so places which could be best sequestered for the use of the government and to lay out towns as well.

So, in the Riverina Townsend laid out the towns of Tumut, Wagga Wagga. We've already talked about Albury. He chose the site of the town of Deniliquin, although another surveyer called Parkinson who was working for him laid it out. But the work of measuring of squatting runs was mainly carried out by contract service. So, there's not much of that detail. If you were researching family history of your squattocracy ancestor Townsend's archive is probably not where you'd look.

Yeah.

Lauren Smith: Thank you so much everybody. Thank you for your questions. Is there one more?

Melissa Clarke: One more.

Lauren Smith: Okay. This is maybe our last one. There will be a signing. You'll have an opportunity to barrel up to Peter and ask some questions upstairs in the foyer.

Melissa Clarke: Trust the journalist to sneak in one last.

Peter Crowley: This is Paul Sakkal from the Melbourne Age.

Paul Sakkal: I didn't think I'd get such a vivid suicide description in a book launch on a mountain and a surveyer, but I'm interested in his mental health. He's obviously an unheralded figure in history. Did he feel at the time that he deserved greater credit for his work, and did that contribute to his mental health? And just another really quick one, this is sign of my ignorance, but I'm amazed that he was doing all this with just ink in freezing temperatures. How did he actually make recordings and what was the practicalities of it? And did surveyors use like a trundle wheel? How did they actually conduct this task?

Peter Crowley: Yes. Townsend actually did think he'd been overlooked for promotion and wrote letters about this again and again during the course of his career. That's the first point.

The nuts and bolts of how they surveyed, they measured distance back in those days using what's called a Gunter's chain, which was a chain of fixed length. And they were just stretch it out from point to point. Taking bearings as they went along and recording that information in their field books.

And the field books were actually quite ingenious in the way they encode this information in a way that Townsend could make sure that when he sat down to draw his maps, all the information was somehow condensed into this field book.

But can you imagine just the, I mean that's how in this country the distance was measured and tamed inch by inch, chain by chain, the surveyors went about their business. And it is, and not just, and through very rugged territory, that map of the Snowy River that I showed you, they chained along the rivers as well. And if you've ever been into that country along the Snowy River, you just can't even imagine how he could have done it.

Melissa Clarke: At some points, the landscape, the level of the scrub, I don't know how you would put something down on the ground to be honest. It's heath or it's scrub that laying something flat seems impossible. So, to conceive how you would do that, particularly on a river's edge, for example, would be incredibly physically difficult to do, let alone metre by metre or yard by yard, chain by chain in that way is incredibly laborious task.

And that he was often using a little more than a pocket sextant. You write up number of times where all he's got is a pocket sextant because other parts of his equipment is broken or hasn't arrived or hasn't been replaced and you're waiting for the weather to clear to be able to take a reading.

Peter Crowley: Yeah. The surveyors were not well served by central management, which was always dysfunctional. And so, Townsend's survey of Gippsland, for example, he surveyed a road from Port Albert to Monaro. He later disclosed was he did the entire thing with his own pocket sextant because he'd asked Robert Hoddle in Melbourne for a more sophisticated instrument. And Hoddle said, "Well, I don't have one in working order."

Melissa Clarke: Sorry, figure out.

Peter Crowley: Bad luck. Figure it out. So, they were constantly having to improvise. They were amazingly resourceful people. And those maps are really accurate. I mean, they're not perfect, but I think somebody, perhaps somebody, I mean you've done a lot of bush navigating, I think you'll probably navigate pretty well using Townsend's maps.

Melissa Clarke: You definitely can. And there are still, I mean I can think of, there's actually a great map in the National Library's collection that you can find on trove of a sketch map of the Budawangs, which is a mountain range to the northeast of Canberra that was done in the 1950s. So, no topographical markings, the same kind of, what are they called? [unclear].

Peter Crowley: The [unclear].

Melissa Clarke: [unclear]. So, the same description, but if they are well drawn and well representative of the landscape that you can absolutely navigate by them. And it's often that descriptive detail that comes with it, which you can see Townsend is often writing about the type of vegetation, for example, in the sides of his maps, that can be just as helpful as a contemporary topographic map if it's well rendered.

Lauren Smith: Thank you. That was a great question and I'm glad that we lingered for that. I will have to stop question time, I'm sorry. But Peter, very generously, will be going upstairs to sign books for us, which are available in the Bookshop, which is still open. You'll be able to sneak up to the table over family dinner. Thank you so much for joining us. Would you please join me in once again in Melissa Clarke and Peter Crowley?