Subject: Map in a map
Date: Mar 08, 2001 @ 06:32
Author: Brendan Whyte ("Brendan Whyte" <brwhyte@...>)
Prev    Post in Topic    Next [All Posts]
Prev    Post in Time    Next


There is a new national museum in Canberra, opening on sunday. TV coverage
featured a quick glimpse of a pool outside the museum, that had an irregular
edge and island-like paving stones near the edge. I wondered if this was
meant to be a map-like pool.
My sources suggest it is:

The official pamphlet describes this feature (The Garden of Australian
Dreams) as 'a richly patterned map of Australia...(that) can be thought of
as a theatrical weaving of both the Great Australian Dream and the
Aboriginal Dreaming...Those two coexistent world viewsare signified by two
maps used to create the garden's surface' Those maps are 'a standard
English language map of Australia' and Horton's map of tribal boundaries of
Indigenous Australia. 'The names and lines of these two maps interweave,
erase and overlay one another. Other fragments are taken from vegetation,
geological and weather maps plus 'various cartographic oddities' such as the
Dingo Fence and the Pope's Line.[This presumably is the line of the treaty
of Tor...., whereby the Pope divided the Spanish new world from the
Portuguese] There are a number of other symbolic features interwoven into
the design. The outline 'map' is basically only the Top End [Ie Darwin and
the top of the northern Territory] The Garden of Australian Dreams is a
creation of a Perth-based architectural landscape group.
Photos once someone I know with a camera can get there...

Brendan
_________________________________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com