Person

Burnett, James Charles (1815 - 1854)

Born: 1815
Died: 18 July 1854
Kangaroo Point, Queensland, Australia
Occupation: Surveyor and Explorer

Summary

James Burnett was appointed a clerk in the New South Wales Surveyor-General's Office (1788 - 1887) in 1833 where he rapidly rose through the ranks. In 1844 he was made head of the Moreton Bay District Survey Office (1840c. - 1859). What is now known as Queensland did not become a separate colony from New South Wales until 1859, up until this point Queensland was referred to as Moreton Bay Penal Settlement, then the Free Settlement of Moreton Bay.

Details

James Burnett's work led him to survey the Dividing Range (1841 - 1842), the Richmond River (1843), the river system beyond the Upper Brisbane River, the Burnett River (named in his honour), and a river which entered Wide Bay.

Chronology

1829: Life event - Migrated to Australia
1833 - 1844: Career position - Clerk, New South Wales Surveyor-General's Office
1841 - 1842: Career event - Commander, Expedition to trace the Dividing Range
1843: Career event - Surveyed the Richmond River
1844 - c. 1854: Career position - Surveyor-General, Moreton Bay District Survey Office, New South Wales Surveyor-General's Office
1854: Award - Fellow, Royal Geographical Society, England

Related Corporate Bodies

New South Wales Surveyor General [I], Colony of New South Wales (1788 - 1887)
James Burnett was a clerk in the New South Wales Surveyor-General's Department, and became the Surveyor-General in the Moreton Bay District Survey Office in 1844.

Date: 1833 - c. 1854

Archival resources

Mitchell and Dixson Libraries Manuscripts Collection, State Library of New South Wales

James Charles Burnett - Records, 1833 - 1854; Mitchell and Dixson Libraries Manuscripts Collection, State Library of New South Wales. Details

Published resources

Book Sections

Dignan, Don, 'Burnett, James Charles (1815-185), surveyor and explorer' in Australian Dictionary of Biography, Douglas Pike, ed., vol. 3 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1969), pp. 303-304. http://www.adb.online.anu.edu.au/biogs/A030281b.htm. Details

Resources

Wikidata, http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q19668538. Details
VIAF - Virtual International Authority File, OCLC, https://viaf.org/viaf/256810521. Details
'Burnett, James Charles (1815-1854)', Trove, National Library of Australia, 2009, https://nla.gov.au/nla.party-1466604. Details

McCarthy, G.J.

Created: 20 October 1993, Last modified: 10 January 2020

Foundation Supporter - Committee to Review Australian Studies in Tertiary Education

EOAS ID: biogs/P000075b.htm

Except where otherwise noted, content on this site is
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
What do we mean by this?

Published by the Centre for Transformative Innovation, Swinburne University of Technology.
This Edition: 2024 February (Kooyang - Gariwerd calendar)
Reference: http://www.bom.gov.au/iwk/calendars/gariwerd.shtml#kooyang
For earlier editions see the Internet Archive at: https://web.archive.org/web/*/www.eoas.info

The Encyclopedia of Australian Science and Innovation uses the Online Heritage Resource Manager (OHRM), a relational data curation and web publication system developed by the eScholarship Research Centre and its predecessors at the University of Melbourne 1999-2020. The OHRM has been maintained by Gavan McCarthy since 2020.

Cite this page: https://www.eoas.info/biogs/P000075b.htm

"... the rengitj, as a visible mark or imprint on the land, is characterised as a place of origin, the repository of all names, as well as a kind of mapped visual expression of the connection between people and places which is to be carried out in the temporal sequence of the journey." Fanca Tamisari (1998) 'Body, Vision and Movement: In the footprints of the ancestors'. Oceania 68(4) p260