Cam IncollFieldwalker automatically draws your property boundary by pulling official government land-parcel data — currently covering Victoria, New South Wales, Queensland, Tasmania, Western Australia, and New Zealand — with manual GPS entry as a universal fallback for anywhere else.
The property boundary is the first line on any site plan. Before zones, before contours, before you think about where anything goes — you need to know where the edges are. What land are you actually working with? Where does your responsibility end and your neighbour's begin?
And yet, drawing an accurate property boundary onto a design is surprisingly difficult. The fence line you can see on a satellite image isn't necessarily the legal boundary. The corner posts might have shifted over decades. The actual lot dimensions are locked away in government cadastral databases that most people don't know how to access.
The government data problem
Every state and territory in Australia maintains its own cadastral database — the official record of property boundaries. New Zealand has its own system too. In theory, this data is publicly available. In practice, accessing it is an exercise in persistence.
Each jurisdiction has a different data service, a different query format, different coordinate systems, and different quirks. Some services return data reliably. Some return data in a format you didn't expect. One state's service initially pointed us at the wrong government endpoint entirely, and its search filter was backwards — excluding every current parcel and returning only expired ones. We found and fixed that within a day, but it's the kind of thing that would stop most people cold.
This is not the kind of problem a permaculture designer should have to solve. You want to know where your boundary is. You shouldn't need to understand government data APIs to find out.
One click, boundary drawn
In Fieldwalker, once your map is georeferenced, the tool can fetch your property boundary automatically. It queries the relevant government data source for your location, finds the matching parcel, and draws the boundary line directly onto your map.
When there are multiple parcels nearby — which happens more often than you'd expect, especially in rural areas where a single property might span several lots — a picker shows you the candidates so you can select the right one. Each boundary gets a readable label generated from the lot and plan data where available, so you end up with something like "Boundary (Lot 5 DP123456) — 2.3 ha" rather than an unlabelled polygon.
The boundary is locked by default, so you can't accidentally drag or reshape it while you're working on the design. If you need to edit it — maybe the official data doesn't quite match reality, or you want to work with a sub-section of the property — you unlock it and adjust through the coordinate editor.
Where it works today
Automatic boundary lookup currently covers six jurisdictions: Victoria, New South Wales, Queensland, Tasmania, Western Australia, and New Zealand. Each one required individual integration work because no two government data services work the same way.
We investigated South Australia and found their cadastral data isn't freely available — it's a paid dataset with no live lookup service. The ACT and Northern Territory have government servers that reject connections from outside their networks. These are noted for future work as access options change.
When automatic lookup isn't available
For properties outside the covered jurisdictions — or when the automatic lookup doesn't find the right parcel — there's a manual entry option. You can type GPS coordinates directly, paste them from another source, or upload a KML, GeoJSON, or CSV file.
The coordinate entry validates as you go: it warns if a point looks like it's in the ocean, flags coordinates that seem to be in the wrong country, and needs at least three points to form a valid boundary. You can come back and edit a boundary you've already saved.
This makes the boundary tool universal. If you have coordinates for your property from any source — a surveyor's report, a council document, a GPS unit, Google Earth — you can get them into Fieldwalker.
Why the boundary matters first
In the Yeomans Scale of Permanence, the property boundary is one of the most permanent elements of a design. It's the frame within which everything else happens. Getting it right — accurately, early — means every other design decision sits on a solid foundation.
And from a practical standpoint, the boundary defines the area for contour generation, for detection, for zone layout. It's what tells the tool "this is the site." An accurate boundary means accurate contours, accurate area calculations, and a design document that matches reality.
Fieldwalker treats the boundary as a first-class element of the design, not an afterthought. Because the first line on the map should be the right one.