Matt Hewson
A new book, Townsend of the Ranges, reveals the story of a man who helped lay the foundations of Geelong.
Author Peter Crowley chronicles the life of the enigmatic Thomas Scott Townsend, a surveyor responsible for mapping the Great Dividing Range, discovering the source of the Murray River and setting out towns and cities across Victoria and New South Wales.
Townsend was also the surveyor directly responsible for Geelong in 1840-41, conducting maritime surveys, laying out streets and starting a number of important surveys from Geelong.
Despite having Australia’s second highest mountain named after him in honour of his achievements, Townsend faded into obscurity.
Encountering Townsend’s name but little else during a series of unrelated research projects, the mysterious surveyor piqued Dr Crowley’s interest; an interest that became “a bit of an obsession”.
“He was a real man of mystery, there was no biographical information about him at all,” he said.
“It was that mystery that really captured my imagination early on… he was almost like a figure of folklore.”
What Dr Crowley uncovered was the portrait of a supremely talented and vigorous man so desperate to prove himself that he worked himself to death via madness.
Townsend of the Ranges also tells the parallel story of the horrors perpetrated by European colonists on Australia’s First Peoples.
“There was an awful lot of violence and dispossession that formed the backdrop of his work,” Dr Crowley said.
“I had to find some way of blending that into his story… because to do otherwise would have been to collude in the fantasy of terra nullius.”
