From bespoke cartography services to satellite imagery, there is no end to the vital work of mapping Australia.
Story Andrew Hull Image State Library of NSW
In a pastel twilight, the sharp clarity of the immediate foreground cedes to an ever-growing vagueness, where vanishing points merge and the apparent horizon curves away, blends into sky and drags the unknown earth beyond with it. Eyes narrow and heads swivel up, then down as fingers trace lines on an unfolded broad sheet of paper, orientating symbols and identifying landmarks, leading to speculation at what might lie beyond these visible references.
“When you open up a map, you’re in this mindset that says, ‘I’ve got a mental map that shows me how I’ve got here to this place and all the experiences that I had to go through to get to this space, which relates to the symbols on the map,” says Riverland archaeologist, anthropologist and author Amanda Markham. “But beyond that, for anywhere we haven’t been, there may be a map, but it’s still a relative blank space – an unexperienced space. So, to use and follow a map isn’t drawing the lines onto blank space like the first explorers, it’s following what’s been mapped before and mapping that into our own experience.”
Amanda and partner Gary Weir are avid travellers of remote Australia and keen observers of their experiences, some of which are shared through their popular social media channel Travel Outback Australia. The SA-based couple bring life experiences from varied careers in Central Australia into their travel offerings and have more than a few maps to inform and describe those journeys, sometimes with Amanda’s philosophical approach, other times through Gary’s more practical view.
“Australia is such a large country. Even though it’s mapped pretty well, we like to go to places where we haven’t been before,” Gary says. “And in many cases, the more outback and remote the better. So you end up with things like mud maps, or a friend gives you a map of somewhere, and you’ve got to try to follow it to where you’re going. Sometimes you’re trying to find old tracks, and you might have a digital version of the track as well as a paper map. And all of a sudden you can get to the point where it says on the map that you can find like a little windrow or something that goes off into the scrub, so you think, ‘Oh, this must be it’.”
Maps are one of the most trusted, valued and regularly used pieces of information we use. They describe our lives and the very nature of Australia. From the practical to the esoteric, maps vary from a set of verbal cues visualised by the listener to highly interactive satellite systems constantly streaming data. Mud maps have always been drawn in the sand to describe geography and direction, while map makers continue to build up complex layers of spatial information depending on the needs and desires of a changing population.
Our earliest maps are linked closely to the historical narrative of the country, beginning with vague conjecture and including epic and sometimes tragic feats of exploration. Maps are also a language used to interpret political decisions, and the demarcation of geography informs the way different areas will develop and what life will be like within their drawn lines.
