The British claimed Van Diemen's Land as theirs when Lieutenant Bowen established a settlement on the banks of the Derwent in 1803. Although they had mapped the island's coasts, they needed to survey its interior as, once mapped, the land could be distributed through land grants or sold to colonists. Accurate mapping by surveyors also meant that decisions about remote places could be made at a central office in Hobart or London.

One of the surveyor's primary tools was the theodolite, an instrument that measures horizontal and vertical angles to plot the distance between points so that they can be marked on a chart or map. These points are used to determine the positions of other objects in the landscape, such as rivers or mountains, property boundaries or buildings. As innocuous as the theodolite may seem, it was one of the coloniser's weapons in the conversion of land into property.

The mapping began in 1803, but by the 1820s there were many boundary disputes between the new landowners. James Sprent (1808–1863), a graduate of Glasgow University, arrived in Hobart in 1830 and was appointed Assistant Surveyor in 1833. Within three years he had created some 50 survey stations approximately 30 miles (50 kilometres) apart, across the south and east of the colony. These were marked with either a stone cairn, a central pole supported by forked stay poles or a lone tree stripped of all but one central stump. Several of the stone cairns are still standing today and Sprent's detailed survey work, including that of Hobart Town, was so accurate that no distortion was needed to fit his plans to today's property boundary data.

James Sprent was made Surveyor General in 1858. Unfortunately, his health had been so badly affected by years spent traversing rugged country that he was forced to retire that same year.