Maker's Name: 
Where made: 
90 × 4 × 0.3 cm

Brass, marked at one inch intervals, and at 1 ft and 2 ft. First inch divided into eighths. Stamped shield with lion and NSW at one end, another larger one at other end together with GR/V/SM/16. ER/II/IS between 20 and 21 inches. On reverse, 111 stamped, dymo label J107. Lacquer worn through in many places.

Until the 1960s police stations in western New South Wales were issued with standard yards to resolve disputes.

The yard (yd) is the basic unit of length in the imperial system of weights and measures. In Australia, the imperial system was the standard system of measurement until the Metric Conversion Act was passed in 1970. This set in motion the process of converting all measurements in the country into the metric or SI system. This system of measurement uses the meter as its basic unit of measurement and a yard is 0.9144 meters.

The primary advantage of the metric system over the imperial system is the use of powers of ten to relate units of the same dimension (e.g. length, time, mass) such as the millimeter, centimeter and kilometer. This is not the case in the imperial system in which a yard can be expressed as three feet or thirty-six inches. Other units defined in terms of the yard include the pole (5.5 yd), the chain (22 yd), a bolt of cloth (40 yd), the furlong (220 yd) and the mile (1760 yd). These units were derived for commercial or industrial use and were standardised in Australia by the National Standards Laboratory which became operational in 1939.

Until recently, the imperial system was the national standard in Great Britain. The basic unit of length was the imperial standard yard and this was defined as the distance between two lines on a bronze bar made in 1845. (This is similar to the standard yard on display.) This bar made in 1845 replaced an earlier standard yard which had been destroyed by fire in 1839.

In the United States of America, the imperial system was used until 1889 when the nation officially converted to the metric system. One reason that has been given for this change was that the imperial standard yard has been shrinking at a rate of 1.5 millionths of an inch per year. However, unlike in Australia, no program to enforce conversion was instituted, with the result that the USA is now one of the few countries still using the old system.