Premier Daniel Andrews reignites controversial Victoria-SA border history
When Premier Daniel Andrews told Victorians not to “get too stressed” if South Australians won’t let us in, he reignited our controversial history with the croweaters over that line that separates us — and one clash was never fully resolved.
Wyndham Leader
Don't miss out on the headlines from Wyndham Leader. Followed categories will be added to My News.
Premier Daniel Andrews’ cheeky call for Victorians not to get “too stressed” about being locked out of South Australia is not the first clash between the two states over border lines.
The dispute goes all the way back to when the border was first surveyed, with the High Court even called in to umpire at one point.
On closer inspection the border line isn’t even straight, with 19th century surveying methods such as chains and lunar observations to blame for “gifting” extra land to Victoria.
The border between the Colony of South Australia and the then Colony of New South Wales, which later became Victoria, was originally fixed as the 141st meridian of east longitude in 1836.
But it would be 11 years before the border was physically defined on the ground, and as pastoralists moving east clashed with graziers working their way west from the Wimmera, the matter had become urgent by the late 1840s.
Surveyors Henry Wade from NSW and Edward White from South Australia were tasked with the job and set out from a point just to the west of the mouth of the Glenelg River in 1847.
That was their first mistake.
The 141st meridian is actually to the east of where the Glenelg River meets the sea but was incorrectly measured by Royal Navy officer Captain Charles J. Tyers in 1839.
Tyers fixed the first ever boundary point between the two states on a sandy beach by carving an arrow into limestone rocks using triangulation with Melbourne, chronometric measurement from Sydney and by lunar observations with a sextant, which later turned out to put the 141st meridian about two miles too far west.
Wade and White headed north for about 200km and reached a place called Red Bluff – about half the distance to the Murray River – before a lack of water and deep sand forced them to turn back to Adelaide.
It was two years until White returned to continue the line north and after most of his bullocks died of thirst he finally staggered to the riverbank in 1850 to complete the border.
The Colony of Victoria separated from NSW a year later on July 1, 1851.
But the error in marking the border wasn’t discovered until 1868 when surveyors calculating the NSW-South Australia boundary north of the Murray River realised it didn’t line up to the one south of the waterway.
The Victoria-South Australia border was in fact 3.6km west of where it was originally supposed to be, leaving Victoria with a bonus 1620sq km of territory estimated to be worth £800,000 at the time.
But by that stage the Victorian government had already begun selling, leasing and claiming taxes off the land and was reluctant to let it go.
The impasse continued until 1911 when South Australia took the matter to the High Court and lost.
They appealed to the Privy Council and the matter was finally settled in 1914 when it upheld the ruling in favour of Victoria on the grounds that Wade and White had used the best surveying technology known at the time, it was done in good faith and agreed to by both parties and the border line had been used continually over the ensuring 60 years.
To this day, because of the error, the western boundaries of Victoria and NSW do not meet, leaving a 3.6km section of the Victoria-South Australia border along the Murray River undefined.
It may be here that Victorians can sneak across the closed border into South Australia, if they really want to.
MORE NEWS
MANHUNT FOR ESSENDON BUS FLASHER
DOZENS FINED FLOUTING 40KM/H RULE