Person

MacCabe, Francis Peter (1817 - 1897)

Born
1817
Dublin, Ireland
Died
27 June 1897
Bowral, New South Wales, Australia
Occupation
Surveyor

Summary

Francis McCabe was a surveyor with the New South Wales Surveyor General's Department for 15 years from 1841. His early surveys were in the southeast of New South Wales. Between 1848 and 1850 he mapped sections of the Murray, Darling and Murrumbidgee Rivers. In accordance with the general instructions of the New South Wales Surveyor General Thomas Mitchell, McCabe was assiduous in recording Aboriginal place names in several language groups during his surveys, possibly the first European to do so. After leaving the Department in 1856 McCabe managed his father-in-law's colliery and fulfilled his political ambitions as member and sometime Mayor of the North Illawarra Council.

Details

Chronology

1833
Career event - Joined the Ordnance Survey of Ireland
1841 - 1853
Career position - Assistant Surveyor, New South Wales Surveyor General's Department
1853 - 1856
Career position - Surveyor, New South Wales Surveyor General's Department
1856 - 1883
Career position - Manager of the Mt Keira colliery, New South Wales

Published resources

Books

  • MacCabe, Michael, The Man Behind the Corner: Surveyor Francis Peter MacCabe (1817-1897) (Sydney: New South Wales Government, Land & Property Information, 2011), 215 pp. Details

Journal Articles

  • Hope, Jeannette and Hercus, Luise, 'The Surveys of F. P. MacCabe and his Records of Aboriginal Placenames at the Junction of the Murray and Darling Rivers', Proceedings of the Royal Society of Victoria, 121 (2009), 193-204. Details

Helen Cohn

EOAS ID: biogs/P006288b.htm

Except where otherwise noted, content on this site is
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
What do we mean by this?

Published by Swinburne University of Technology.
This Edition: 2024 November (Ballambar - Gariwerd calendar - early summer - season of butterflies)
Reference: http://www.bom.gov.au/iwk/calendars/gariwerd.shtml#ballambar
For earlier editions see the Internet Archive at: https://web.archive.org/web/*/www.eoas.info

The Encyclopedia of Australian Science and Innovation uses the Online Heritage Resource Manager (OHRM), a relational data curation and web publication system developed by the eScholarship Research Centre and its predecessors at the University of Melbourne 1999-2020. The OHRM has been maintained by Gavan McCarthy since 2020.

Cite this page: https://www.eoas.info/biogs/P006288b.htm

"... the rengitj, as a visible mark or imprint on the land, is characterised as a place of origin, the repository of all names, as well as a kind of mapped visual expression of the connection between people and places which is to be carried out in the temporal sequence of the journey." Fanca Tamisari (1998) 'Body, Vision and Movement: In the footprints of the ancestors'. Oceania 68(4) p260