William Wedge Darke
Australian surveyor
William Wedge Darke (1810–1890) was an Australian colonist and surveyor.
Biography
William Wedge Darke was the son of John Darke of Hereford and Elizabeth Darke, née Wedge, and younger brother of John Charles Darke and a nephew of John Helder Wedge from whom he learnt his profession. He arrived in Van Diemen's Land in 1827 with his parents, younger brother Henry and sister Elizabeth.
Surveying career
In the early 1830s he was in private practice in Van Diemen's Land as a surveyor, then moved to New South Wales where he joined the survey department. In 1836 he was sent as an Assistant Surveyor under Robert Russell to survey the new settlement at Port Phillip.
At Port Phillip Darke carried out some of the first surveys of the new town of Melbourne and was instrumental in laying out the streets of the new town for sale at the first land auctions.
He had numerous disputes with Robert Hoddle and was eventually engaged on a contract basis.
Darke brought a wooden caravan from Sydney and set up camp with his family near Robert Russell's wood and daub hut on the south side of the Yarra River in what is now central Melbourne. The caravan, dubbed 'Darke's Ark', had two rooms and a piano, and was drawn by bullocks to locations convenient to his surveying duties around Port Phillip. The caravan was eventually left at the beach as a bathing house.
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This entry incorporates text from “William Wedge Darke” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.