Our special guest speaker, Tony Proust, was motivated to research this topic after learning that his family's land at Numeralla near Cooma was on an Indigenous songline. There is substantial evidence that some of our roads and highways follow ancient traditional Aboriginal walking tracks  across our continent. Tony discussed the meaning of a songline, from a non-indigenous perspective and suggested that these tracks probably coincide with traditional indigenous songlines.

His thesis is that just like surveyors who learn the lay of the land by walking, traversing, mapping driving and understanding the land – so do traditional indigenous cultures who had to develop the means of describing and navigating across their lands so they could find their way from place to place and being able to pass that knowledge onto the next generation, over millennia, without the benefit of the written word.

Speaker

Tony Proust grew up in Canberra, and then graduated with a Bachelor of Applied Science (Surveying) in 1974 in Western Australia. He worked as an Engineering Surveyor in Australia and in the Pacific Islands for the first few years out of university, becoming registered as a surveyor in NSW in 1983.  Tony completed a Diploma of Urban & Regional Planning in 1990 and has worked in local government and the public and private sectors since then largely as a planner/surveyor. Tony is also past President of ISNSW. Tony now mentors young surveyors, lectures part-time at the University of Newcastle and enjoys finding time in retirement to research interesting projects such as the one he is presenting on!

Registration

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CPD

The event is allocated one (1) Geospatial Council CPD point.

This webinar has been assessed for BOSSI - 1 Survey Practice point for those who watched the live webinar and 0.5 Survey Practice point for those who watch the recording.

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