Description

Extended Data

DAAO URL

https://www.daao.org.au/bio/robert-hoddle

Birth Place

London, England, UK

Biography

sketcher and surveyor, was born in London on 20 April 1794. He came to Sydney in July 1823 and was appointed assistant surveyor under Surveyor-General John Oxley and sent to survey the site of Brisbane. In 1837 Hoddle was posted to Port Phillip as senior surveyor over Robert Russell , a predictably acrimonious relationship. He conducted the first land auctions at Melbourne and within the year had surveyed and planned Geelong. In 1842 he became an alderman on Melbourne’s first city council. After Separation in 1851 Hoddle was appointed Victoria’s first surveyor-general. He is attributed with laying out Melbourne’s streets in their formal grid pattern. In his leisure hours Hoddle enjoyed gardening, playing the organ and flute, collecting books and pictures, and sketching. The major collection of his pencil and watercolour drawings (LT) includes Melbourne – Port Phillip – 1840 from Surveyor-General’s Yard , a bucolic scene which is appropriately detailed in its architecture but surprisingly naive in the exuberant addition of people and animals dotted throughout the drawing. His maps are more professional, but the crudely drawn, often out-of-scale, people and animals in some of his watercolours add a liveliness to otherwise prosaically precise views. Some of his landscapes, possibly done with the aid of a camera lucida, are more technically accomplished. A sketch he made of Kiama, Illawarra, New South Wales, was later worked up into an oil painting by Henry Gritten . Hoddle married Mary Staton at Surrey, England, in 1818; they had one daughter. In 1863, following Mary’s death the previous year, he married the 18-year-old Fanny Agnes Baxter. They had four children, including Agnes, who later painted his portrait (o/c, LT). Land purchases in Melbourne had made Hoddle an extremely wealthy man but in 1877, ill with scarlet fever, he transferred all his assets to Fanny, including £38 000 in cash, £59 000 in government debentures and valuable real estate in Melbourne City, Essendon, Frankston and elsewhere. When he died in 1881, aged eighty-seven, he left nothing. Writers: Staff Writer Date written: 1992 Last updated: 2011

Born

b. 20 April 1794

Summary

Sketcher and surveyor, was born in London and arrived in Australia in 1823. In 1851 Hoddle was appointed Victoria's first surveyor-general.

Gender

Male

Died

1881

Age at death

87