Development

Cadastral map, miners homestead leases at Mount Shamrock, 1926. Land surveyors carefully depicted the boundaries of properties and roadways, often masking variations in the actual layout of a town. At Mount Shamrock, the mapping of leases was an important step as it was part of administrative acknowledgement of the existence of a town that had in fact been present for almost 30 years. Collection of Geraldine Mate.

Mud map of Mount Shamrock, identifying residents c1904. For residents of Mount Shamrock, their everyday landscape was associated with the people who lived there. This remembered landscape depicts the relative location of families, businesses and places (such as the mine, the school and the cemetery), rather than the more structured map of the town lots. In this map places and people are conflated – changes through time and actual distances are unimportant. Collection of Geraldine Mate.