Introduction to Remapping Sydney Meridian

Over these next 24 posts we retrace a path of what is known as the Meridian of Sydney. This virtual walk will carry us through plural dimensions of time, past and present, as well as space. Along the way, you will be given the directions for this walk as well as fictions, assumptions and random observations about the establishment of time and its measure in colonial Australia. But how did this project begin?

When I first visited the Observatory in November 2019, there were a lot of things that I wanted to understand, but one odd feature of the Observatory stood out. Look at this photo and you’ll see what I mean.

See on the roof, how there are two slots? Underneath the right hand opening is the Transit Telescope, which used to take measurements of the passage of the Sun or stars passing overhead. But since there is only one meridian telescope, there should only be one opening. This oddity made me wonder: was the Meridian as fixed as they say, or had it moved? I asked my guide on the day – Dr Andrew Jacob MAAS Curator at Sydney Observatory – what he thought. This question launched a fascinating conversation, to be continued in this blog, as we embark on a path southward following the Sydney Meridian.

Shutters on Sydney Observatory transit room: Photo: Lily Hibberd, 18 November 2019.

Each day we visit a ‘station’ along the line. While the stations retrace the Observatory’s ‘prime’ Meridian, like the line itself, the stations are imaginary. But the locations shown on the Google Earth along the walk are real, approximating the path of the line emanating from the Observatory’s Transit Telescope.

This map provides a guide to the location of each station on this walk. To orient yourself, follow my notes and the coordinates on each post from Station 1 to 24.

For each station there is also a poster, which provides clues and historical references for the story of Sydney Meridian. There are also two sets of coordinates. The first of these in black indicates the location of the ‘original’ Meridian, while the one above it in white is the location of the station according to Google Earth on that given day. As we will see, the line is not quite so fixed after all, because these markers, along with the Meridian, are shifting in relation to our changing planet.

Sometimes you will also see symbols and marks on these posters. These are the scars made on boundary reference trees by government surveyors as they staked out land parcels all over the city, triangulated from the Meridian to define the boundaries of each property. Sydney’s early colonial cityscape would have been marked by these trigonometric survey markers in the landscape – vanished long ago.

We have 24 stations ahead – let's begin with the first, inside the Observatory’s Transit Room.

Station 1

Presented by Powerhouse Museum as part of the 22nd Biennale of Sydney: NIRIN 2020.

This project was supported by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body.

Time Projects