AustLit

'In the European imagination, Australia was on the map long before it was a geographic reality. Terra Australis Incognita was the imagined counterweight to the northern hemisphere landmasses, a grey plate plonked at the bottom of cartographers’ efforts centuries before Dirk Hartog nailed his up at Shark Bay. Even when Europeans arrived in Australia, they acceded to this prefabricated idea: superimposing imported place names and laying down arbitrary internal borders, ruler-straight for thousands of kilometres, over an immemorial atlas created by 500 clan groups or “nations”, whose traditional lands were delineated by boundaries that had nothing to do with bureaucratic fiat.' (Introduction)