Application Examiner's Notes

This series consists of Application Examiners Notes, which document the history of a parcel of land being converted from the pre-Torrens General Law system to a certificate of title.

The Application Examiners Notes made up part of the requirements for an application to be lodged to bring General Law land under the operation of the Transfer of Land Act or the Torrens System. They were prepared for each application.

The Application Examiners Notes are detailed investigation notes and title information prepared by the Legal Examiner who was examining an application to covert a General Law title to the Torrens System. The Examiner used the Application Search Notes (VPRS 18870), the Application Survey Examiners Draughtsman Report, and the chain of original deeds and supporting information provided by the applicant. The Examiner was required to investigate the available documentation in order to grant the conversion application. The series is useful for tracking deed transactions, previous owners and their occupations, and encumbrances and affecting easements to a parcel of land as it was under the General Law System.

The first land tenure system to be introduced into Victoria in March 1838 was called the 'General Law' or 'Old Law System', or more commonly called today, NUA (Not Under Act). Land under the Torrens system (Real Property Act 1862) was therefore 'under Act'. This system was directly based on the principles of the English Common Law. 

Under the General Law system, land ownership was based on a set of deeds, being the original deed held by the owner and a Memorial which was generally registered at the Registrar General Office (RGO). These documents helped prove ownership back to the Crown Grant, although there was no compulsion under this system to register the Memorial with the RGO.

Title was proven by producing the collection of deeds, which was commonly called the ‘Chain of Title’ held by successive owners, as well as a search of the Memorials lodged at the RGO. A Memorial is a copy of the original deed. Every time land changed hands, the chain of deeds needed to be produced and a new deed/Memorial needed to be drawn up by lawyers. It was a cumbersome and expensive system, in which the risk of deeds being lost or destroyed was high. Land ownership in the General Law system was and is still not guaranteed by the Victorian government.

Although the expectation was that all land would be brought under the operation of the Transfer of Land Act fairly quickly, this did not prove to be the case. In the mid-1980s, after 120 years of operation of the Torrens system, large areas of land remained under the General Law system. The registration of Memorials  continued until  the 31 December 1998 when the register was closed. This was an effort to help speed up the Conversion process, as all new land transactions would have to be conducted under the Transfer of Land Act following an application to convert the deed into a certificate of title.