When I was in my fourth year of university, I applied for a 12 month undergraduate position at what was then the Department of Lands, out in Bathurst NSW. That’s the job that set me on the path of GPS, and ultimately is responsible for the fact that zombies, dinosaurs, Lego and lactose intolerant volcano gods are all a part of my work life, as well as in the life of hundreds of surveying students and graduates. Who all likely think I’m a touch mad.

Since Bathurst all those years ago, a series of events that have included, but are not limited to: surveying rural Queensland with a broken arm, monitoring dune erosion while 8 months pregnant, doing the survey from hell that was submitted as the first Qld ePlan, and avoiding being a cadastral surveyor; have led to the point where I’ve written a GPS textbook with a Zombie on the cover.

This probably all makes much more sense if you know that I’m a Professional Fellow in Surveying at UniSQ, which is a fancy way of saying I’m a lecturer that came from industry. UniSQ has been letting me loose on classes since 2018, which has resulted in me having the absolute privilege of delivering courses in all the things I love to people who seem to want to listen.

This book is born of my want to make learning fun, without compromising on the content. I am lucky to have inherited my approach to writing from my Dad, who had a never ending capacity to make even the most boring thing fun, and ensured I had a sense of humour that is most definitely reflected in this book. Add in a dash of the neurospicy variety, and you end up with something that resembles me: Chris, the slightly mad lecturer who has classes that are never ordinary, encourages memes as a legitimate response to assignment questions, and will never turn down an opportunity to have Lego in my class.

I hope you enjoy this book, and if you have any comments, suggestions or memes you want to throw my way, please get in touch.

About the Cover

Also, if you’ve made it this far, you really deserve an explanation about the Zombie cover. This book was originally a PDF for a course I teach called Introduction to GPS. For that course, I needed to come up with assignments that students who are all over the world (and sometimes even on ships or in Antarctica), with limited access to equipment fancier than their phone, could all do. And it had to be more interesting than measuring a handful of non descript marks in a park somewhere. Challenge accepted!

Around 2am one morning while I was writing the first version of what would become this book, the random idea of making the assignment about surviving a zombie apocalypse appeared. Students could use whatever app they liked to collect GPS points at locations that would provide them with water, food, security and exercise, and they could record short videos discussing what errors were influencing the  GPS quality. They would also have to prepare a ‘Survival Manual’ – in case they got turned into zombies, those left behind would know how GPS worked. Once the students had completed the course, I’d send them a little paracord keyring to add to their zombie survival kit. It has become a bit infamous – I’ve heard students ask each other if they’d done the zombie course yet. The cover of this book is a testament to learning never being boring.