sketcher, surveyor, explorer and mine administrator, was born in Surrey, England. Introduced to survey and landscape study by his father, a teacher of military surveying at Sandhurst, Burr began survey work in about 1829. He was employed by the Tithe Commutation Commission in England when, on the recommendation of E.C. Frome , he gained the post of deputy surveyor-general of South Australia. Burr took office on 29 June 1839 and reached Port Adelaide on 18 December to begin active duty. That his early work in the colony was highly regarded is known from the protest lodged by Frome in 1841 against a proposed general reduction in public salaries.
In 1844 Burr accompanied Governor George Grey on an exploring expedition to the south-eastern parts of the colony. Mount Burr in the Rivoli Bay area commemorates his part in the exploit, of which Burr wrote an account for the Royal Geographical Society of London. He had already evinced scientific interests in a paper on the physical geography of the interior read at the Adelaide Mechanics Institute in December 1842 and published in the local press. His book, Remarks on the Geology and Mineralogy of South Australia , illustrated by line diagrams, was published in 1846.
Burr became a justice of the peace in September 1847. On 12 October he resigned from government service to accept the general superintendence of the Burra Burra copper mines. The engagement ceased abruptly in September 1848 with his dismissal by the directors of the South Australian Mining Association on the grounds of 'negligence and inattention’. Other sources, however, claim he had offended by putting the interests of miners above profit. Burr won an action against the company but was not reinstated. Thereafter he worked privately as a land and mining surveyor in South Australia until gold lured him to Victoria in July 1853. In September he joined the government service and was district surveyor at Ballarat at the time of the Eureka riot. As a witness to that disturbance, Burr gave evidence before the commission of inquiry.
Ambition to explore the inland led Burr to offer his services to the governments of Victoria (1856 57) and South Australia (1859), to no avail. Indeed, his regular government employment ended with his dismissal on 31 August 1857 for visiting Melbourne without leave. Nevertheless, it seems that severance was not complete. Survey Department records after that date list the receipt from Burr of map sheets and landscape sketches.
Late in 1860 Burr sailed for London where, by letter dated 9 February 1861, he was introduced to the eminent geologist Sir Roderick Murchison by Charles Sturt , who remarked that Burr was 'a man of considerable talent’ who had brought with him many notes and sketches of geological interest. What became of these papers is not known. Burr returned to Melbourne after seven and a half months in London and in 1862 gave evidence before a board inquiring into the possibility of amalgamating the Mining and Geological Surveys in Victoria. His last years appear to have been ones of failing health and growing intemperance during which friends helped find work for him.
At the inquest following the discovery of Burr’s body in the Flagstaff Gardens, Melbourne, on 25 September 1866, he was described as a draughtsman in the Crown Lands Office. He had married, for the fourth time, in the week before his sudden death. Some copies of Burr’s charts and survey sketches, which confirm the judgements of Frome and Sturt, are held by the South Australian Archives and there should be more of his work in Victoria (perhaps in the Public Record Office). No finished art works have been traced.
