journeys through an Atlas

Journeys through an Atlas

Amongst my father’s books I inherited Newnes Pocket Atlas of the World and Gazetteer. I can’t find its publication date, anywhere, but I assume it must have been in the early nineteen twenties, when Father was at school. In his distinctive handwriting he wrote on the last page, Distance around Australia = 6992.02 miles, and that is probably one of the few ‘facts’ that remain unchanged.

Although most of us would recognise many of the countries because their shapes are familiar to us, even if the maps in the Atlas were the latest available and care had been taken to make sure they were to be accurate, they can at best only be estimations of reality. While maps appear to confirm the existence of spaces and places, to show topographical features, landmarks and directions from one place to another, the boundaries of countries, their names and many other details change from time to time as a result of conflict or some geological upheaval.

What is recorded may depend on the mapmaker.

For example, the tourist map I took with me to Costa Rica explained that the Coca Cola sign referred to as the central landmark in the city San Jose had been taken down many years ago. I read somewhere that a group of soldiers who got lost in the mountains found their way out using a map of some other place all together. The tragic Lasseter didn’t have an accurate map and tried to return to his reef of gold using his watch to get his bearings and got lost because his watch was wrong. To this day, no one knows whether the reef only ever existed as a figment of his imagination.

The subjectivity of maps is more easily understood when they are used to describe places where specific measurements don’t apply.

In an interview (Gerry Turcotte, ed, Writers in Action,Currency Press 1990) about his memoir 12 Edmonstone Street, novelist, poet and essayist David Malouf said, ‘If you grow up in the kind of wooden house that I grew up in, and if your first sense of dimensions is developed there, then that really is your first reading of the world and you go on to apply that to whatever else you look at.’

This is certainly so for me. At the centre of the map of the world of my childhood, lies a small white house built in two wings and it is surrounded by a verandah and in front of the house there is a lake where we used to swim on hot days. All of this was set in the midst of a wide flat plain which appeared to be held down by an enormous sky with a distant horizon. Neither the house, the shed or the lake are there any more, but they are still marked on local maps, and I could find where they used to be.

To the north west of my first home is The Outback, The Red Centre or The Never Never, created out of random snippets of Mary Grant Bruce, Henry Lawson, Banjo Patterson. Right at the top of the map is England is that tiny country that Grandmother called Home. It was where they used to do things properly she said, and while she lived out her days in our colonial outpost, it remained at the centre of her world. Between the Outback and Grandmother’s home lie the fabled walled cities in the middle of uncharted deserts pictured in Arthur Mee’s Children’s Bible in Pictures. Camel trains and bands of barefoot travellers cross all the spaces in between.

Like Alice in Wonderland, I have moved through a world that continually shrinks and grows. The Atlas and its pastel coloured countries are now almost as fragile as my dreams.

Back in the present again, re-reading anthropologist Hugh Brody’s Maps and Dreams I have come across another reality. Originally I bought Brody’s book when I heard that it was about hunters who found their way to their quarry in their dreams.

On that earlier reading I didn’t take much notice of the fact that Brody wrote the book after he was given the job of mapping the lands of northwest British Colombia because it was the country where the Beaver Indian People lived and hunted, and it was directly in the path of a projected oil pipeline.

The epigraph, taken from Clarence Aspassin Blueberry River Indian Reserve Pubic Hearings December 1980 reads: ‘Are we supposed to be nice and give you our traplines so that you can put your pipeline and benefit other people . . . The traplines are for us, so we keep them. Why cannot you guys understand that? . . . I guess you don’t really understand that this is our way of life and always will be.’

Suddenly the Beaver People in British Colombia feel as though they are close neighbours. I’ll send Clarence Aspassin’s words to the Taungurong elders who are working with the contractors to keep a lookout for any Taungurong sacred sites or artefacts, along the proposed path of the pipeline which travels through their country and will take water from the Goulburn River for Melbourne. I’ll also keep in mind that water has become our oil of our time. The furthest away from ‘home’ my Father ever went was to the Channel Country. He also dreamt of finding one of those lost canyons where the water and never ran out. I’d love to know if he’d found it yet. Then I’ll read in the Gazetteer about the longest rivers, the populations of various countries, the areas of the largest islands and the deserts and the populations of countries, and ponder yet again the ever-changing nature of the world.

'In the pipeline' for next time - more on journeys - starting off this time at Mitchelton winery with Susan Fell-McLean's exhibition of paintings, textiles and sculptures inspired by her travels in recent years.