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Mapping
Our World
TERRA INCOGNITA TO AUSTRALIA
MARTIN WOODS AND SUSANNAH
HELMAN INTRODUCE THE
LIBRARY’S LATEST EXHIBITION
For millennia, Europeans speculated
about the world: its extent, lands and
seas. In ancient and medieval times,
some saw the lands beyond those they knew
as inhospitable places inhabited by strange,
fantastical creatures. The idea of south took
hold in people’s imaginations. Some doubted
a south land existed. Others mapped it
optimistically, naming it Terra Australis,
Nondum Cognita, Incognita, Beach, Lucach,
Magellanica, Jave la Grande, or, (in their own
languages) ‘south land’.
By the fifteenth century, the ambitions,
rivalries and curiosity of European monarchs
and republics fuelled increasingly adventurous
voyages of discovery and trade, made
possible because of advances in navigational
technology. These voyages began to encroach
on the southern part of the world. Speculation
became science, and navigators used maps
to guide their voyages. Information gleaned
at sea was relayed to cartographers to assist
future journeys. Gradually, through necessity,
great skill and sheer luck, in encountering
the realities of lands and
peoples who lived at
the ends of the earth,
Europeans pieced
together a world map. Australia, the last
inhabited continent to be charted, was unlike
anything they had imagined.
The Library’s summer blockbuster
exhibition, Mapping Our World: Terra Incognita
to Australia, is open until 10 March 2014. It
explores the story of the European mapping
of Australia, from early notions of a vast
southern land to Matthew Flinders’ published
map of 1814. Unprecedented in Australia, it
brings together some of the most spectacular
and influential maps and globes, rare scientific
instruments and evocative shipwreck material
in European and Australian collections and
is built around the National Library’s own
extensive maps collection. Revered maps such
as the Fra Mauro Map of the World, and the
maps of legendary mapmakers—Ptolemy,
Mercator, Blaeu, Cook—embody key moments
in the charting of the southern hemisphere.
International and Australian lenders have
made available their best, most original and
most important works for this exhibition.
Some of them have never been displayed
before. Many of the maps created before
Europeans reached Australian waters are well
known in the northern hemisphere, where
they have particular resonance.
Until now, the great maps
underpinning modern
cartography have
been unavailable to
those of us
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