This is where the trouble started, because Stanley’s correction was due to faulty equipment. Visiting the location some time after Tyers’ expedition, he estimated that the latter’s mark was 2.25 miles east of the 141st meridian. Owen Stanley, captain of HMS Britomart, made sure that would never happen. Tyers’ Arrow, on the Southern Ocean, was supposed to be the starting point of an inland surveying expedition. In 1839, surveyor Charles Tyers left a giant arrow made out of limestone rock just east of the mouth of the Glenelg River, at a spot he had calculated as being the 141th meridian. However, back in the 19th century, defining a border on a map was one thing demarcating it on the ground, in the Australian Outback no less, was quite another. The new colony inherited its western border from NSW. In 1839, NSW south of the Murray River became the District of Port Phillip, and in 1851 that district became the separate colony of Victoria. In 1836, the Letters Patent that established what was initially known as the colony of South Australia declared that its eastern border would be the 141st meridian east of Greenwich.Īt that time, South Australia had only one neighbor to the east: NSW. That would make them citizens of South Australia, the state where they do most of their business anyway. Quite a few local Victorians want the border drawn as was intended by South Australia’s founding document, almost two centuries ago. And with the coronavirus further complicating things, many now want the anomaly gone. But if you’re local, that border is nothing but trouble. The result is a zigzag border – a wonderful anomaly, if you’re into that kind of thing. Here, South Australia’s eastern border hitches a ride of about three miles downstream before it resumes its southward plunge. That mighty river flows into South Australia from the east, where it forms the border between New South Wales (NSW) to the north, and Victoria to the south. Zoom in on the place where that border meets the Murray.
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