'mapping'

European mapping is based on Western concepts as they relate to geographical space. From the early 1500s to the 1800s, maps represented religious and political views of the communities that the map makers were serving as well as the scientific knowledge at the time. Artistic beauty was combined with geographical information because of the intention to sell the map or please a patron or employer.

Gradually, during the 1800s, the decorative content of maps was removed in the search for accuracy and scientific precision. One of the challenges of western map making is to represent the earth, a curved surface in a three dimensional space, on a flat surface. The compass, the sextant and the printing press were a few of the inventions that drastically changed the accuracy and distribution of maps.

When Australia's coastlines were being plotted by European mariners and navigators in the late 1700s to 1800s, there was a growing acceptance of a scientific approach to mapping, based on compass points, latitude and longitude, scale and elevation.

In 1810 Matthew Flinders completed the first chart of the Australian coastline including the separation of Tasmania by Bass Strait, naming the continent 'Australia'. Flinders was accompanied by Bungaree, an Aboriginal man from the Broken Bay area, when he sailed on the Norfolk and by Bungaree and Nanbaree on the Investigator.

Both western maps and Indigenous representation of 'country' use conventional symbols. Symbols in Aboriginal maps can sometimes have more than one meaning depending on both the context of the relationship to other symbols and also who is 'reading' the map. For example, a series of concentric circles usually means a camp site, but it may also mean a rock hole, fire or fruit. Spiraling lines can mean water, rainbow, fire, snakes, lightning, a string or a honey storage place for native bees. Indigenous maps are also not necessarily to scale in a linear sense, and may not show every feature of the landscape.

Indigenous co-operation with drawing European coastal charts

In the summer of 1801, Matthew Flinders was welcomed by Nyungar upon his arrival aboard the Investigator and various items were exchanged. On the 1802 voyage from Sydney, Flinders recruited two Aboriginal people, Bungaree, who had sailed with him on the Norfolk, and Nanbaree. The visit of Flinders and other mariners to the coast of Arnhem Land is recorded in the local Aboriginal paintings of 'praus' (Macassan sailing vessels) and European ships at rock art sites.

In March 1812, the Colonial Surveyor George William Evans was sent to explore Jervis Bay, to determine a possible inland route back to Port Jackson as part of the colonial practice of systematic surveying of the land⁶. Bundle⁷, an Eora man who ranged from Port Jackson to Parramatta in the company of Tedbury, the son of Pemulwuy, was renowned for his tracking skills. Bundle was with Evans on board the Lady Nelson. The journey was never publicised by Macquarie, because it almost ended in disaster for the members of the exploration party. This survey expedition did, however, result in the settlement of the Illawarra area in the drought years that followed.

In the Illawarra region, the Aboriginal artist Mickey of Ulladulla⁸ (c.1820–1891), a member of the Dhurga people, drew the world around him with an extraordinary vitality and sensitivity to detail, including a chart of the coastal areas north and south of Ulladulla. Depicting flora and fauna of Ulladulla, Mickey added to the European records of the coastal area. His works are an unequalled record of an Indigenous perspective during the mid to late 1800s, a time otherwise dominated by European artists and writers.

The peoples of the Torres Strait Islands⁹ are sea-faring people known for their navigation skills. The dreamtime stories of their people, the Tagai, usually focus on stars, which they used to navigate a safe journey when travelling across the seas in their double outrigger canoes under sail¹⁰.

European theories of a large southern continent

European ideas of a southern continent date back to Greek mathematician and philosopher Pythagoras (ca. 560 – ca. 480 BC). His followers were the first to document the theory of landmasses in the southern hemisphere to counterweight the northern hemisphere to ensure a balance in the globe. This idea of a large southern continental mass strongly influenced cartographers until the late 1400s with the belief in the unknown Great South Land¹¹.

In 1570, Terra Australis Nondum Cognita (south land not yet known) appears as a gigantic Antarctic continent on a new world map¹² published by Flemish cartographer Abraham Ortelius (1527–1598). The Spaniard Benito Arias Montano's world map¹³ (1571) displays a portion of Northern Australia with an undefined southern boundary, reflecting the French school of map rendition for the southern hemisphere.

By the late 1500s, Portuguese and Spanish explorers opened a sea route to India and Asia and charted most of Indonesia, the northern New Guinea coastline and several islands in the South Pacific.

In 1581, Dutch merchants needed access to spices in order to fund costly military operations in a war with the Spanish and formed the Dutch East India Company¹⁴. This led to Dutch exploration along Australia's shores and to the making of maps of Australia's north, west and south.


http://australia.gov.au/about-australia/australian-story/mapping-australias-coastline 

liminality

Liminality is that space between, between time and between physicality; existence may not seem real or solid. Liminal experience may be through the standard five senses, but the other senses, those that we deny and do not understood are often enhanced. It is a different plane of awareness and experience. 

Liminal 1 ~ Angourie, 1979

 

Liminal 2 ~ Lowhead, 1981

One of the simplest ways to conceptualize the becomingness of liminal space in media is to think of the virtual. In his essay “The Reality of the Virtual,” Slavoj Žižek addresses Gilles Deleuze's notion of the virtual as “pure becoming without being,” which is “‘always forthcoming an already past,’” but is never present or corporeal.7 The virtual is a liminal space that consists only of its becomingness-state, and not an actual being or object to become. It exists as pure becoming that suspends both “sequentiality and directionality”; it is a passage, but there is no line of passage.8

Even though both Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner locate liminality within an event (ritual for both of them, and initiation more specifically for Turner), the event is clearly not the only place in media where one can find an understanding of the liminal. Alan Liu, just like Žižek before him, plays on the idea that the liminal can exist as this larger, directionless (or at least, reciprocating) space. He identifies an “encounter” of new media between literary and digital traditions, which he notes is a “thick, unpredictable zone of contact—more borderland (9) than border line.”10 This encounter zone, he explains, adapting Jean-François Lyotard’s concept, produces and accommodates new media that are inherently pagan; that is, they are “other” and “outside,” but also inextricably intertwined with that which they are separated from. Liu elaborates with an explanation of Marshall McLuhan’s theory of the essence of new media by stating that “even as [McLuhan] projects the otherness of new media onto the cultural other, he introjects that otherness into the cultural self.”11

Folklore and popular culture have allowed many different manifestations of liminal beings to emergence as representations of ambiguous identity. Turner notes that “liminality is the realm of primitive hypothesis, where there is a certain freedom to juggle with the factors of existence.” 12 He describes the nature of the subject as somewhat incorporeal, dissolved, or even “invisible” during the liminal period.13 The subject, while neither located in the departed stage nor in the arrived-at is still reliant on the presence of both stages. This “transitional-being,” or “liminal persona,” is characterized by a series of contradictions.14 As having departed but not yet arrived, he is “at once no longer classified and not yet classified…neither one thing nor another; or may be both; or neither here nor there; or may even be nowhere.”15 This subject, during the liminal stage, is “‘betwixt and between’” all the recognized fixed points in space-time of structural classification.”16

Whether or not they are identified as such, the notion of liminal beings has been explored by scholars throughout the field of media theory. McLuhan mentions objects of technology, such as the camera or the handgun, as being extensions of the human body. The result of this technological prosthesis is a metaphorical amputation of some aspect of “humanness” from the person, who, having been stripped of what makes him whole as a human being, has now slipped into the liminal state.

Donna Haraway, in her famous essay, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” discusses the liminality of the cyborg in terms of boundaries and contradictions. She articulates the complexity of the cyborg as being an “image of both imagination and material reality,” a “hybrid of machine and organism”; it exists as both-but-neither of these states.17 Like Turner, Haraway references invisibility as a key classification of the liminal being insofar as it cannot be recognized as any singular, corporeal, or embodied entity. Cyborgs, she notes, “are about consciousness.”18 In a semiotic sense, “they are floating signifiers” that cannot construct a sign as they are not accompanied by necessary signifieds.19

Although the official terminology for the liminal addresses points in time and places of action, one can see that by situating it within the complex context of media—areas and practices of mediation, as well as mediated subjects and objects—the concept of liminal shapes a variety of ambiguous forms (and anti-forms). Keeping in mind more comprehensive set phrases, such as “betwixt and between,” “transitionality,” “becomingness,” and “borderland,” allows a flexible entryway into a sense of pure essence in the liminal—to, literally, its liminality.

Allison Wright

The University of Chicago :: Theories of Media :: Keywords Glossary ::  liminal, liminality

http://csmt.uchicago.edu/glossary2004/liminal.htm

Liminal borderlands in Irish literature and culture By Irene Gilsenan Nordin, Elin Holmsten

Zones / 'i' lands

Island Continent: oceans bordering Australia ~ Indian Ocean, South Pacific Ocean, Southern Ocean, Pacific Ocean

Uninhabited Islands~ http://www.lifewithinme.com/2010/08/lost-cast-away-ten-amazing-uninhabited-islands/

 

The average height above sea level in the Maldives is only 5 feet (1.5 meters) with the highest point rising a mere 7 feet 7 inches (2.3 meters).

The history of Australia as an island

Dad was always fascinated by islands too, tropical islands, uninhabited, no doubt the result of a Robinson Cruso seed planted in his childhood, or dreams of escaping the drudgery of farm life.

The first time I read out loud in front of the class, I pronounced  'island', this unfamiliar word that embodied my nation state, as 'is land' and was made feel small. The sight of the word 'island' has been both a fascination and a reminder of the raw truth self-knowledge ever since. This awkward word represents 'home' to me, but the homecoming, back to Self, like the memory of that Grade Three day, is raw and essential - anticipated, but also avoided for its mixture of pleasure and pain.

Zones = Nation (taking away the Romantic notions attached to the 'nationalistic' nation

Szeman, Imre. Zones of Instability: Literature, Postcolonialism, and the Nation, The Johns Hopkins University Press December 30, 2003

Neither nationalist or patriotic, but 'island' is both 'I' and 'home'. To Patrick White Uluru was 'our red heart'.  'Island' is heart, not place - unreachable, un-returnable, unrecoverable, it is a time, liminal space in life, a memory, an 'Avalon'. 

a skirted coastline, rock pools on Sunday afternoon, flounder hunting in estuaries by underwater battery-powered light on barmy summer and sometimes freezing spring nights. Dad and I the hunters, Mum drove the car and stayed alone while I wondered and wandered, pondering the primordial shallow waters and sand drifts.

then they took me to the drivein ... we saw Island of the Blue Dolphin and I had nightmares for 4 years, afflicted not by the plight of poor girl, but poor dogs

Life on islands leaves you free, and your foibles become unique


http://www.amazon.com/Island-Blue-Dolphins-Scott-ODell/dp/0547328613/ref=sr_1_10?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1303547674&sr=1-10#reader_0547328613


Jung's island = the conscious in the sea of the unconscious
http://books.google.com.au/books?id=uegLZklR0fEC&pg=PA78&lpg=PA78&dq=Carl+Jung+island&source=bl&ots=D_TFq299hH&sig=vW-fcxGXR8hCThRg8uRA3jkGAaw&hl=en&ei=QVazTeCDApGSuwPaq4DZAg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&sqi=2&ved=0CCkQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q&f=false

Toilers of the Sea, Albert P Ryder

 

Carl Jung: Wounded Healer of the Soul: An Illustrated Biography By Claire Dunne

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Dictionary of Symbols By Juan Eduardo Cirlot

http://books.google.com.au/books?id=-ECFg1a_6bgC&pg=RA1-PA160&lpg=RA1-PA160&dq=symbol+island&source=bl&ots=rRWL6bo_45&sig=lA7jsgEzzgfSSmyNCqzJcPrya5c&hl=en&ei=aMKzTcGyC4WKvQOC0f2YBw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=7&ved=0CEUQ6AEwBg#v=onepage&q=symbol%20island&f=false