All in good time: Mike Bosse whizzes through the caves with the Zebedee technology. Photo: Supplied by CSIRO
Government surveyor Oliver Trickett took years in the 1920s to survey a part of the Jenolan Caves that has now been mapped in a few hours using 3D technology.
Trickett's maps - so accurate they are still used today - were made using a sextant, a compass and a length of chain. He made a model of the Chifley Cave (previously known as the Left Imperial Cave) which still graces the caves' visitors' centre.
When the images taken by the CSIRO's Zebedee hand-held laser scanner of this same cave are compiled, they may be used to create a 3D model which could allow visitors to see the caves - including nooks and crannies out of the reach of most - from anywhere in the world.
Oliver Trickett's painstaking progress. Photo: Supplied
The same technology was used to create a 3D map of the leper colony of Peel Island Lazaret in four hours. Historians already knew the leper colony in Moreton Bay had been segregated, with the whites in more comfortable quarters than other racial groups, but architectural archaeologist Kelly Greenop said seeing it in 3D brought the story of isolation and segregation to life.
''It brings it home because you can see how low the ceiling was in the coloured quarters,'' said Ms Greenop, a lecturer in the school of architecture at the University of Queensland. ''It was made of corrugated iron, and it would have been awfully hot, damp and mosquito-infested.''
In contrast, white men and women were housed in individual Queenslander houses.
The Trickett cave model. Photo: Supplied
''They were up off the ground in ventilated buildings which had a little bedroom with a window, and a verandah,'' she said. ''They had a sense of dignity with those buildings whereas the coloured buildings don't.''
Ms Greenop said Zebedee, named after the low-tech spring that bounces the 3D laser around, allowed historians to capture a detailed record of heritage sites, ranging from fragile ones at risk of damage from natural disasters, to remote ones.
Speaking during Heritage Week, Jonathan Roberts, director of CSIRO's autonomous systems laboratory, which developed the technology, said there was increasing interest in the technology as a way of documenting, tracking and preserving historic sites and buildings.
With it, scientists and archaeologists could see how things were changing. ''It is feasible to map a building or a cave system, and do it the next year and the year after,'' he said. ''It makes it cost-effective … And if something had changed, they could act immediately.''
The CSIRO saw its work as building on 120 years of mapping at the caves. That's something Trickett would have loved, said Dan Cove, its manager of operations. ''He was obsessed with caves,'' he said. ''He was mad about mapping and he was an innovator who was all about progress and accessibility.''
http://heritage-week. gov space.gov.au/