Student
SURVEY
Expeditions
Malcolm Dam &
Malcolm Town Site
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Christiaan van der Merwe - Malcolm Dam & railway bridges
Malcolm Dam is a large dam located to the east of Leonora just off the road that connects Leonora and Laverton. It was dug out in 1902 to service the steam trains in the area. It now serves as a free camp-site and haven for the local bird life.
The Malcolm Dam is the area of interest for this particular project. Using GPS, an accurate as built of the area can be recorded. Any future surveys to the area can use this initial survey as a baseline to check for any degradation or changes to the area. In addition to the dam the abandoned railway bridges to the east of Malcolm dam will need to be picked up with a laser scanner. Using a laser scanner to survey the bridges can create an accurate point cloud of information very quickly and accurately.
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Matt Olsen - Malcolm Geodetic Baseline
Originally designed for military purposes GPS (Global Positioning System) has been readily adapted for civilian usage it is now a part of everyday life.GPS is used in mobile phones, navigation systems and has many other applications, in specialised format the use of GPS is a key part of today’s modern Surveying Techniques. GPS delivers location in latitude, longitude and height in a relatively short time frame without the need to measure angles and distances from known locations.
With the overall scope of the 2016 survey expedition being the Comparison of the traditional techniques against the new and modern, the use of GPS will play an integral part in our data analysis.
Using the latest technology today in 2016 we propose to use a geodetic survey to observe the existing baseline on the Kookynie / Malcolm baseline to compare methods.
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Cassidy Taylor - Malcolm Town Site Cadastral/Geodetic Survey
Malcolm is an old, abandoned town site which was once a thriving goldfields town. It is located roughly 852km north east of Perth City and 20km east of Leonora. The area was first explored by John Forrest in 1869 who was traveling with a settler by the name of Malcolm Hamersley.
The town site obtained its name later in 1896 after the mountain in the area, Mount Malcolm which was coined by Forrest during his explorations. Gold was discovered throughout the area between the years 1895-1896. In the month of November 1896, the area underwent a government survey to declare it as an official town site.
The cadastre survey project that is to be undertaken is to re-peg a nominated original town site lot by traditional survey methods. This involves theodolite observations to cadastral boundary pegs. As this is now a ghost town and the original town survey was carried out in 1896, the survey marks are over 120 years old. This could prove a challenge as the survey marks have most likely been degraded and/or destroyed over time. To find the boundary pegs it will be necessary to inspect previous survey plans and field books completed by surveyors of the Malcolm area.
Once the cadastral survey of the town lot has been completed it is a requirement that the area be spatially upgraded. A spatial upgrade is the improvement of the relative and absolute accuracy of the digital database on the Survey Cadastral Database (SCDB) (Landgate, 2015).
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