The original Land Acts and ‘Titles of Land’ in Australia were literally measured by the length of the links of a surveyor’s chain. The standard surveyor’s chain contained 100 links.
Perimeter measurements were often presented in Links on the drawings – and Chains and Links in the descriptive areas.
→ One ‘link‘ in the surveyor’s ‘chain‘ = 7.92 inches
(20.12 cm in today’s metric measurement)
→ One ‘chain‘ would consist of 100 ‘links‘
(20.12 metres in today’s metric measurement)
→ One quarter length of the ‘chain‘ would consist of 25 ‘links‘ which = 1 ‘perch‘
(5.0292 m in today’s metric measurement)
It was from this primitive measurement of a ‘link‘ and a ‘chain‘ that area and measurement systems evolved.
Generally, area measurements included on ‘Titles of Land’ were presented in Acres, Roods and Perches – whereby One Acre = 4 Roods = 160 square Perches.
→ 1 ‘rood‘ = 40 square ‘Perches‘ = ¼ acre
(1,011.710049 sq m in today’s metric measurement which is, of course, one quarter of an acre)
This scale of area measurements allowed for simple representations of the size of land as per the example below:
.
The following table endeavours to break down the rather complex units of measurements into a comprehensible format:
