The year 2006 marks the 400th anniversary of Dutch landfall in Australia and its result – the first European mapping of Australia. This exhibition is presented as part of the nationwide celebration of Australia on the Map 1606-2006.
Drawing the Line: Tasmania on the Map is an exhibition that draws on the rich resources of the State Library of Tasmania’s Heritage Collections to show every aspect of Tasmanian mapping. Beginning with maps created before Terra Australis was known to exist, the exhibition traces the discovery, exploration and increasing knowledge of Tasmania. The earliest item in the exhibition dates from 1593, the most recent was published in 1998.
Maps, like pictures, are designed to show selected aspects of their subjects. They high-light certain details, deliver particular messages, take many forms and use many different techniques. We usually think of maps as depicting topographical features, representing the spaces and boundaries between places. There are many other ways to interpret them.
Medieval European maps typically have a religious dimension. They are often best understood as describing relationships in time or on a spiritual plane. Modern demographic and economic maps similarly seek to describe activities and situations in ways that sometimes bear little direct relation to the physical spaces they occupy.
Late-medieval Europeans knew that the Earth is a sphere. The ancient Greek and Roman scientists led them to believe that a land mass in the southern hemisphere acted as a counterweight to the lands above the equator. The ‘knowledge revolution’ of the European Renaissance was well under way before the development of printing in the mid fifteenth century, but, as is the case today, new technology increased the speed of change. The first printed edition of Ptolemy’s Geographia (the standard atlas of the classical world) appeared in 1475; another fourteen editions were published by 1525.
In these same decades, Spanish and Portuguese explorers were stretching the boundaries of the known world southward, eastward and westward. Columbus crossed the Atlantic in 1492; Da Gama established a sea route to India in 1499; around 1519-21 an expedition led by Ferdinand Magellan circumnavigated the globe and Spanish forces led by Cortes conquered Mexico. By the late sixteenth century the lands of east and south-east Asia were becoming well-known to Europeans. Plausible locations for the mythical Terra Australis Incognita (‘unknown southern land’) were diminishing.
The Dutch East India Company was established in 1602. Dutch ships made the first confirmed European landfalls on the Australian coast. Willem Jansz (or Janszoon) in the Duyfken explored New Guinea and landed on the west coast of Cape York in 1606; numerous others followed, deliberately or accidentally, culminating in Abel Tasman’s discoveries of Tasmania and New Zealand in 1642-43.
Before Tasman sighted the land at latitude 42° 30’ in 1642, the unknown southland appeared on European maps as the stuff of legend, a place inhabited by bizarre creatures. Tasman’s discoveries were shown on a world map published by Blaeu in 1648, but few other maps included them before the 1660s.
Tasman raised his nation’s flag and named this southern area ‘Van Diemen’s Land’ after the Governor of Batavia, but the Dutch did not pursue their claims. The next century was dominated by imperial rivalry between England and France.
The maps exhibited in the Allport Library and Museum of Fine Arts are from the period of European exploration and settlement. They include charts resulting from the work of English and French explorers – du Fresne, Furneaux, Cook, d’Entrecasteaux, Flinders, Baudin – and the maps and plans of colonial surveyors, made as British settlements expanded across the island during the nineteenth century.
The work of these surveyors, rather than the journeys of the explorers, defined the landscape in European terms. They determined sites for settlements, routes for roads and marked out land for settlers to acquire. In order to increase the population, emigrants were being encouraged with grants and assisted passages, creating a high demand for land.
As the colony grew, the administrative boundaries changed regularly; from Governor King’s proclamation of two counties in 1804, to Macquarie’s and Arthur’s police districts to the electoral divisions of 1851. All these changes appeared on the many and sometimes confusing maps of the island issued during the nineteenth century.
In the north-west, the decisions and actions of the Van Diemen’s Land Company were to shape the economy and demographics of the region until well into the twentieth century.
Early settlers in Tasmania faced an alien environment. The threat posed by escaped convicts and the often tense relationship with Aboriginal Tasmanians compounded their problems. Relations between settlers and the Aboriginal people degenerated into open warfare in the 1820s. Military campaigns, culminating in the infamous ‘Black Line’ of 1830, appeared to have little effect, perhaps due to the capacity of Aboriginal guerrilla fighters to exaggerate their numbers and conceal their casualties. The government resorted to other means to clear the landscape of its original inhabitants. George Augustus Robinson’s ‘friendly mission’ persuaded many groups of Aboriginal people to accept re-settlement on Flinders Island. By the late 1830s the growing numbers of free settlers could begin to persuade themselves that they were living in an ‘Antipodean England’.
The maps exhibited in the Tasmaniana Library show some of the ways in which the landscape has been transformed: by European settlement, by changing economic imperatives and by modes of transport. It also demonstrates the remarkable diversity of approaches to mapping during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Robert Clancy, The mapping of Terra Australis, Sydney: Universal Press, 1995.
Raymond John Howgego, Encyclopedia of exploration, vols 1 & 2, Sydney:
Hordern House, 2003-2005.
Alan Jones, Backsight: a history of surveying in colonial Tasmania, Hobart:
Institution of Surveyors, 1989.
R.V. Tooley, The mapping of Australia and Antarctica, 2nd ed., London: Holland Press, 1985.
