Abstract This article considers a curious document – Baker’s Australian County Atlas – which contains carefully illustrated maps of each of the 19 counties in the colony of New South Wales in the mid-1840s. The analysis seeks to bridge the gap between high-level geographical studies of the British invasion of New South Wales and historical analysis of settler colonial property formation. We argue that the Atlas reveals the mechanics of territorial accumulation and Aboriginal dispossession in nineteenth-century New South Wales in their historical and material specificity, locating instances of ‘improvement’ – clearing, fencing and the construction of temporary and permanent buildings – at the centre of settler colonial land administration and sovereignty. The article demonstrates that the legal obligation to improve ultimately regulated colonial urbanization, enacting a process in which buildings and other structures functioned less as ends in themselves than as discrete operations within a more pervasive and abiding process of dispossession.

The New South Wales colonial project was a land-centred enterprise that became dependent on the surveying and sale of land. The process of land alienation was a significant factor in the configuration of the colonial territory as well as the development, distribution and typologies of architecture. This article considers a building that was central to this project: the Lands Building in Sydney that housed the Lands Department, the bureaucracy responsible for implementing the governmental instruments relating to Crown land. An analysis of the building suggests that systems of governance were deeply entwined in its form, planning and use. Of particular concern is the integration of symbols and technologies of surveying and land recording that are integrated into the design of the building and its subsequent adaptation. These include the configuration and expression of the façade, the organisation of the plan, a domed observatory and measuring instruments. At stake is the reframing of the architecture of the State as a technology of governance with territorial reach.