Grimoire for the Digital Humanities:
The Forbidden Atlas
3. The Ley Lines and Contours of Melbourne
Authors: Dr Mitchell Harrop, Dr Emily Fitzgerald
A powerful feature of new digital methods is the ability to take existing source materials and look at them afresh, gathering new information and insights from the perspectives provided. This chapter looks at one example, visualising historical contour maps of Melbourne from 1853 and 1880, in order to examine suspected changes in elevation of the central business district.
If we were to invoke the powerful magic that could temporarily vanish all the structures built in Melbourne since European settlement, we would be examining a physical landscape very different to what existed here prior to 1835. Historian James Boyce has stated that:
“Of all Australia’s major cities, the natural environment of Melbourne before British settlement is perhaps the most difficult now to imagine.” (Boyce, 2011, 4).
The Yarra River, the dominant feature of the landscape that remains, has been shaped and changed for easier navigation and control, particularly to stop the deep and widespread flooding across the floodplain that would occur after it burst its banks. This river has been dredged; cleared of tree trunks and branches in the early days of settlement; had a channel created in the 1880s to counteract the irregular course (which caused the creation of Coode Island); experienced the removal of the falls above the turning basin that split the river between fresh and saltwater; widened, deepened and straightened in the 1890s; and further flood control measures were introduced into the first half of the twentieth century (Dingle & May, 2008). Gone too are most of the swamps and lagoons that were a feature of the landscape south of the river to the bay, and north of the river as well, though some remain, such as what is now Albert Park Lake (Lack, 2008).
Importantly for this chapter, the transformation incantation over the site where the central business district’s Hoddle grid now sits went beyond the vanishing of the grassland and trees, and the apparition of buildings on the surface and bodies below, ready to haunt Melbournians for generations to come. The shapes of the gentle slopes that the city was placed upon were changed to accommodate street leveling, attempts to mitigate flooding from the Yarra, and then changes to drainage that were a consequence of these alterations across the middle of the nineteenth century.
Without clear records detailing what changes were made to the elevations of Melbourne, it can be hard to picture how European settlement shaped and changed the landscape. Being able to see what the landscape previously looked like isn’t just a flight of fancy, either. Data on what has changed is useful for historians, archeologists, environmental scientists, and government departments such as the Victorian Department of Environment when planning works that require deep foundation construction.
While we don’t have the magic to take us back to that earlier landscape, we can create a digital representation of the sources we have, such as contour maps drawn in the nineteenth century, and visualise these changes. The creation of this phantom and ghostly visualisation requires:
- Digital images of historical maps, depicting elevations, that have been stretched, shrunk and scaled to fit perfectly over a contemporary map.
- A dataset of locations (i.e., latitudes and longitudes) and elevations at many points that have been derived from each of the historical maps.
The next two sections tackle each one of these in turn, using ...
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