FAIRBURN, EDWIN (1827-1911) was born at Paihia, Bay of Islands, a son of W. T. Fairburn, of the Church Missionary Society. Educated at the mission school at Waimate, he entered the deeds registry office in Auckland. From this he transferred in 1847 to the Survey department, being its first cadet under C. W. Ligar. As a youth he went to Germany to complete his education, studying the language and engineering. He also spent some time in the deeds registry office in Sydney, and published a pamphlet on land registration in which he adumbrated some of the features of the Torrens and the New Zealand land transfer systems.

In later years Fairburn was engaged in laying out the town of Oamaru and was employed under Heale in the triangulation of lower Waikato. Having measured the baseline at Ngaruawahia with the old-fashioned standard chain, he adopted for the first time in New Zealand the continuous steel band, the use of which he urged upon both Heale and Percy Smith. In 1877 he was transferred to the new Surveyor-General's department and became a district surveyor in north Auckland. There he practically introduced the system of graded roads and in a few years replaced the old bullock dray tracks by a graded highway of 200 miles stretching to Mangonui.

Fairburn retired from the service in 1892 and died on 9 Dec 1911. He was a fine Maori scholar and published some papers on the language in the Transactions of the New Zealand Institute. Incidentally he studied shipbuilding and introduced some original ideas into his novel The Ships of Tarshish. He wrote also on the preservation of the mammoth in Siberia and an astronomical explanation of the flood in Genesis. He was a foundation member of the Auckland Choral Society and the first secretary of the original Agricultural Association (of which he was a life member).

N.Z. Surveyor, Dec 1911

Reference: Volume 1, page 135

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