Anthony Gerald Bomford: 17.01.1927-10.05.2003.

Tony Bomford, a former Director of National Mapping Australia, passed away in Canberra on 10 May 2003 aged 76. Tony was a surveyor, mapmaker and mathematician. He was well known for his love of travel, kayaking, stamp collecting, poetry, music, making woollen rugs to mathematical and geometric designs and carving polyhedrons from red box timber.

Born in India of English parents on 17 January 1927, Tony's early years were spent there before being sent to England for his education at Shrewsbury School. The challenge of little-known landscapes was kindled early in his career when he undertook several mapping projects for the British Schools Exploring Society on expeditions to northern Quebec, Iceland and Lapland.

His father, Guy, was an officer of the Royal Engineers attached to the Survey of India, of which, with the rank of brigadier, he later became director. Brigadier Bomford, the British Army's noted geodesist, went on to be head of survey for General Slim's 14th Army in Burma before later teaching geodesy at Oxford University. Some Australian surveyors will recall using Brigadier Bomford's text on geodesy for their surveying examinations.

Tony followed his father into the Royal Engineers. He elected to serve in the Survey Corps after enlisting in the army in August 1944. The army gave him two stints at Cambridge University, where he completed the short course in engineering with first-class honours in 1945 and returned a few years later to Cambridge's Pembroke College. He graduated with a first, as well as winning an extra year to do specialist studies in mathematics.

While at Cambridge in 1951 he married Adelaide-born Elizabeth Honey, whom he had met the previous year. Back with the army, he went on a two-year secondment with the British Overseas Survey to Tanganyika (now Tanzania).

He was seconded from the British Army in 1955 to Duncan Carse's South Georgia survey as its chief surveyor. In six months, Bomford and his seven companions surveyed the whole island. His map of the British-owned island south of the Falklands won him the Ness Award of the Royal Geographic Society, the citation stating that his work had established a new standard in Antarctic mapping. His map has remained the definitive one of South Georgia and one of the sharp spires marked on it bears the name Bomford Peak.

His interest in Australia led him to take leave in 1954 to visit the country. In 1958 he returned on exchange from the British Ordnance Survey to work with the Australian Army Survey Corps. He worked on army mapping projects in central Queensland and in the Kimberley and one of the features he mapped in the Kimberley was subsequently named Mount Bomford.

Tony returned to Britain and spent two years with the Ordnance Survey before moving to Australia and joining the Division of National Mapping in 1961 as a senior surveyor. Over the next 20 years Tony became Supervising Surveyor (Geodetic Surveying), Assistant Director and then Director in 1977. He remained director for five years, before taking early retirement in 1982.

During those years he made a significant contribution as a member of the National Mapping Council's Technical Subcommittee, as well as to the Institution of Surveyors, Australia, of which he became Federal President. Tony was also President and member of the Canberra Division and a member of the Australian Institute of Cartographers. In all positions, he made a major contribution, particularly on the technical front. He worked hard to establish harmonious working relations with state surveying organisations and the Army Survey Corps.

In fact, Tony's first work in Australia was the geodetic survey and adjustment that established the control network and associated geoid over the launching range at Woomera.

This was the first geoid determination in Australia and the techniques were extensively used over later years in mapping the geoid over the continent and determining the geodetic datum of best fit.

Immediately after moving to National Mapping Tony began work on the adjustment of the national geodetic survey. As well as cooperating at working level with each of the members of the National Mapping Council in collection of data he compiled the Fortran program to make the least squares adjustment by variation of coordinates. The only computer able to cope with the volume of data at the time was the CSIRO CDC 3600. Tony wrote much of the program before the computer was installed in June 1964 and the Varycord program's first run was only three months later.

Mr R.H. Hudson of the CSIRO Computing Research Section wrote the sub-routine for solution of the normal equations, based on the method of Cholesky. The adjustment covered 2506 triangulation and traverse stations, divided into 161 sections with 101 junction points, Laplace observations at 533 of the stations and some 53000-km of tellurometer traverse. Two connections across Bass Strait provided Australian Geodetic Datum (AGD) coordinates for Tasmania and USAF Hiran connections to a traverse up Cape York extended the Australian Geodetic Datum to Papua New Guinea.

The final run of the National Adjustment was made on 8 May 1966. The surveys were not free of mistakes, to use Tony's distinction between 'mistakes' and 'errors'. His view was that 'Surveyors are paid to get the right answer, and the wrong answer scores nought; yet the only man who can be quite certain of making no mistakes is the man who says nothing and does nothing'. Mistakes were methodically tracked down and rectified, with no loss of good will anywhere at his working level.

The establishment of the AGD based on this adjustment was a very significant step in the availability of accurate coordinates over the Australian continent that we enjoy today. We are all, to a degree, in Tony's debt. Retirement gave Tony what he said were the best 20 years of his life. He was able to travel abroad and to do creative work at home. He walked and climbed in many parts of North and South America, Iceland, the Himalayas and other countries. He kayaked in Greenland, New Guinea and other waters, and revisited South Georgia. Tony wrote and illustrated each and every trip. His oral histories, as well as illustrated journals of some of his journeys, are at the National Library of Australia in Canberra.

Tony was well known to Canberra surveyors and assisted with conference activities when held in that city. He was generous with his time, cheerful and matter-of-fact yet his commitment to any task in hand was absolute.

When cancer was diagnosed early last year, he was given about six weeks to live. In fact, he had 15 months. This enabled him last November to undertake a visit to Heard Island and some of the other more remote islands of the South Indian Ocean. Six weeks before he died he kayaked on Canberra's Lake Burley Griffin.

His wife, Elizabeth, two sons, Richard and Philip, and two daughters, Mary and Annabel survive Tony.