Last year a research team of staff and students at the University of Otago's School of Surveying sought the views of hydrographers to use in an investigation considering the development of the profession in New Zealand as part of a larger project titled: Tuia: 250 years of navigation, map making and belonging. Tuia 250 commemorated the first meetings of Māori and European at the time of Captain Cook's first visit to New Zealand in 1769.

We are so grateful for all the thoughtful and detailed responses we received, which totalled over 50 (we had thought >20 would be a good result!), and thank you and your colleagues for your valuable contributions.

In 2019, as we worked on the fantastic questionnaire input you gave us, we shared interim findings with audiences at the Survey+Spatial NZ (formerly NZIS) conference, the NZR AHS seminar, at a School of Surveying seminar, with students from Te Tumu (School of Māori, Pacific and Indigenous Studies) at Otago University and at the NZ Coastal Society conference.

The final results of our investigations have now been published in  the article 'Cook: Our Professional Ancestor' in the recent Special Edition of New Zealand Surveyor. We also have another publication in this edition discussing the evolution of hydrographic technology and charting:

1) Cook: Our Professional Ancestor [page 79]

2) Charting Our History [page 131]

To read these, New Zealand Surveyor Special Edition (Dec 2019, no. 305) can be downloaded at:

https://www.surveyspatialnz.org/members/Publications/Attachment?Action=Download&Attachment_id=5873 [direct to the Special Edition]

https://www.surveyspatialnz.org/members/Publications/nz_surveyor_journal [to all online versions of this journal]

We encourage you to share our articles widely with the hydrographic community – we hope they will be especially interesting to those who responded so positively to our questionnaire.

We also wish to acknowledge the support of:

1) The Australasian Hydrographic Society (AHS) who funded our students. This enabled the running of online survey, gave our students a day on the water using multibeam, enabled our students to present their work at the S+SNZ conference and will facilitate the proper presentation of the charts donated in 2) below.

2) Ron Tyson (of NZ Ocean Technologies Ltd) for his generous donation of three 1700's charts which formed the focal points for our second published article.

If you have any queries about the research please contact Emily Tidey on emily.tidey@otago.ac.nz