reasons, rather than stemming from any wish to preserve native cultures; in his journal, Mitchell wrote that, "‘The great convenience of using native names is obvious … so long as any of the Aborigines can be found in the neighbourhood … future travellers may verify my map. Whereas new names are of no use in this respect". Consequently, the surveyors of the colony were among those few settlers who took an interest in local languages. They were also working in places where the local people were still living on their traditional lands and speaking their own languages and dialects. Larmer recorded Aboriginal words and the areas in which these words were used. His work, collated as “James Larmer’s Vocabulary of Native Names” (1853), is one source for fragments of the vocabulary of lost and endangered Aboriginal languages. It is based on his earlier hand-written notes, some dating back to the early 1830s. His lists include words from the Darkinyung, Awabakal, Wiradjuri and Eora languages, and the Dhurga language dialects spoken by the Yuin peoples around Batemans Bay and Ulladulla. There is a list of the Aboriginal language names for the land features and localities of Port Jackson. Legacy Although Larmer recorded and thus preserved something of Aboriginal culture, his work as a surveyor was essential in furthering the colonisation of Aboriginal lands. Most significantly, by marking boundaries—defining leasehold and freehold landholdings—and officially assigning titles to settlers, Larmer and the other surveyors were legitimising—at least under the colonial laws of his time—the dispossessing of the land's Aboriginal inhabitants; it was the first step in the process of extinguishing what would much later—in 1992—be recognised as Native Title over those pieces of land. From July 1837 to end June 1840, in just three years of his lengthy surveying career, Larmer alone had surveyed 160,443 acres, out of a total of 875,089 acres of land that was surveyed and so taken from its traditional owners. The best land for cropping, grazing, and other agricultural purposes was also the most bountiful land for Aboriginal food sources. The alienation and clearing of their traditional lands and the loss of natural flora and fauna had an enormous impact on the original inhabitants; it effectively forced them onto Crown Lands, Aboriginal reserves, the lands of other Aboriginal peoples, or to the margins of the new settlements, and so caused the disruption or end of their culture and