“Marking the Journey” could not have been a better theme for this year’s conference as it was the School of Surveying’s 60th anniversary. The theme also aligned with the republished autobiography of Archie Bogle in the Part I of the three-part book, ‘The Measure of the Man’, allowing us to look back in time to allow us to reflect and appreciate the Journey that has been. “Walking backwards into the future”, a phrase thrown around at the conference, reminding us, that to best prepare ourselves for the future we need to look into the past.
The three-day conference was jam-packed with informative and educating presentations from modernising Landonline, challenges in the City Rail Link project, challenges in large scaled brownfield development from the Piritahi alliance, to a panel discussion on the cadastral system moving to NZTM 2000 and many more interesting presentations.
Upon arriving in Dunedin on the first day, I attended an afternoon session on survey capture in Landonline and in a group we worked through a challenging boundary definition.
If there was a cadastral job to bring out all the cadastral tools out of the toolbox, it was this example. Uplifting the limitations of a parcel that is limited as to parcels, intersections of bearings, half angle calculations, occupation age investigation, questions of adverse possession and questioning what the original intention was of the surveyor, were all required as a minimum to get started.
A job of this complexity required no stone to be left unturned. As a surveyor expecting to sit the professional examination interviews in April 2024, these are the kinds of presentations and group discussions which I can benefit from.
Overall, it was an electric couple of days in the lecture theatres also in the link where it was great to meet former classmates, former lecturers and friends.
The three-day conference was a blast!
