Will Edmunds the solo champion from 1900s of making maps of South Australia topography, mainly Adelaide/hills
Will Edmunds entered topographical mapmaking via his reconnoitre and sketching experince as lieutenant with the fifth contingent South Australian Imperial Bushmen in the Anglo-Boer/South African War (1899-1902). Back home, he later took on the solo project of producing maps such as his Topographic sketch of Mount Barker (at left).
William (Will) Edmunds became a lone map-making champion of early 20th Century South Australia, especially detailing the topography and roads of Adelaide and its hills.
Born in 1872, the seventh of 10 children at the Adelaide suburb of Alberton, he moved with the family to Gladstone in South Australia’s mid north, where his father was a stipendiary magistrate. Edmunds showed an early interest in drawing, passing a model drawing examination at 16. He attended St Peter’s College in Adelaide 1887-90 where he showed sports talent.
Edmunds joined the Gladstone military volunteers in 1888 at 16 and soon joined South Australian National Rifle Association matches at Port Adelaide firing range. He was selected in the 1893 South Australian rifle. After leaving Gladstone, he joined the Adelaide Rifles later the 16th Australian Light Horse Regiment. Lieutenant Edmunds volunteered to serve in the Anglo-Boer/South African War from 1899, leaving on the transport Ormazon in 1901 as eighth in command of the fifth contingent South Australian Imperial Bushmen. His drawing and riding skills became useful in reconnoitring and sketching of African countryside.
Edmunds returned to Adelaide on the Manchester Merchant in 1902. In 1898, Edmunds joined the South Australian surveyor general’s office in the field staff unit. His duties included surveying pastoral country, sketching features of the country, taking levels around bores, surveying townlands and blocks for village settlers. As a draftsman, he later worked on plans related to the census, federation, pastoral land, vermin boards, and district councils – more in administration than mapmaking.
In 1910, Edmunds boldly suggested that he be seconded to the commonwealth defence department for two years to do topographical mapping, in the absence of the survey office’s lack of interest in this area. Edmunds produced South Australia’s first topographic map Adelaide, South Australia in 1914. John Lines’ 1992 book Australia on paper: the story of Australian mapping noted that this was the only 1:63,360 topographic map available in South Australia for the next 20 years: “Edmunds was the first to undertake series mapping in South Australia and was virtually a one-man band in topographic mapping”.
After two years, Edmunds returned as a draftsman in the South Australian survey office that still wasn’t prioritising topographical mapping. In his own time, he produced his own topographical maps and publishing them privately.
With the 1920s arrival of motor car, Edmunds published a 1946 booklet as Topographic maps of South Australia covering the areas and roads around Aldgate, Brighton, Henley, Millbrook, Semaphore and Uraidla. In 1936, following up his work around Mount Barker in the Adelaide Hills with military surveyors in 1914 , Edmunds published his Topographic sketch of Mount Barker. Edmunds used the standard tools of the time—an aneroid barometer and a plane table allowing plotting of the plan and field observations to be done simultaneously—and travelled on foot or horseback. He prepared and painted his maps in a barn at his family’s “Burnlea” home, 101 Osmond Terrace, Norwood.
In 1936. for the centenary of South Australia's European colonisation, Edmunds recreated William Light’s 1837 plan of Adelaide and North Adelaide. The largest and most striking of his maps was the 1838 Road plan of the Adelaide Hills, later placed near the information desk of the State Library’s Spence Wing. Staff, researchers and visitors to the State Library continued to use and reproduce his maps where historic and cultural assessments needed to show before-and-after landscapes of South Australia.
