Robert Hoddle (21 April 1794 – 24 October 1881) was a surveyor and artist. He is best known as the surveyor general of the Port Phillip District (later known as the Australian state of Victoria) from 1837 to 1853, especially for creation of what is now known as the Hoddle Grid, the area of the CBD of Melbourne. He was also an accomplished artist and depicted scenes of the Port Phillip region and New South Wales. Hoddle was one of the earliest-known European artists to depict Ginninderra, the area now occupied by Canberra, Australia's National Capital. Biography Early life Hoddle, the son of a bank clerk for the Bank of England, was born in Westminster, London. He became a cadet-surveyor in the British army in 1812. Hoddle worked in the Ordnance Department and took part in the trigonometrical survey of Great Britain. Hoddle then sailed for the Cape Colony, South Africa in 1822 where he worked on military surveys. Surveying in Australia Hoddle migrated to the Australian colonies, arriving in Sydney, New South Wales, aboard the William Penn in July 1823. Governor Brisbane appointed him assistant surveyor under Surveyor-General John Oxley. Hoddle spent the next twelve years in Queensland and later still in New South Wales where he surveyed the sites for the towns of Berrima and Goulburn as well as Bell's Line of Road in the Blue Mountains. Between 1830 and 1836, Hoddle made several visits to the rural district now occupied by the Australian Capital Territory (A.C.T.), where he surveyed property boundaries. Squatters were urgently pressing for government surveyors to legalise their rural holdings. Hoddle's field book indexes the history of the aforementioned areas and pastoralists— George Palmer, Robert Campbell and Hamilton Hume. Hoddle arrived in Port Phillip, the future site for Melbourne, in March 1837 in company with Governor Bourke, as senior surveyor with his assistants D'Arcy and Darke. He was to take charge of the surveying work which had been begun by Robert Russell, who many years later claimed to have surveyed the first grid of streets. Whether Hoddle surveyed from scratch or used Russell's initial survey has been the subject of controversy, but they both followed the then standard grid layout and alignment. Hoddle's survey, a copy of which survives in the Public Record Office of Victoria, is dated 25 March 1837, and covered the area from Flinders Street to Lonsdale Street, and from Spencer