The Americas have the Mississippi and the Amazon, Africa has the Nile and Asia has the Ganges and the Mekong, among others. So why wouldn’t Australia have a large river system – or an inland sea?
Early surveyors of the unexplored centre and west of Australia, fanning out from the earlier settled east, kept on the lookout for Australia’s Amazon, or at least a large body of water, possibly connected to the outside ocean.
In 1827, former East India Company officer Thomas J. Maslen published this map of that inland sea in his book The Friend of Australia, which provided instructions for surveying and exploring the island-continent’s interior.
In retrospect, those instructions aren’t very useful; Maslen extrapolated the Macquarie and Castlereagh Rivers as headwaters of a huge river flowing across Australia into the Indian Ocean at Australia’s nort-west coast. This river separated a northern land-mass (labelled ‘Australindia’) from a southern one (named ‘Anglicana’).
It took a few more decades for the explorers to realise that Australia’s interior is extremely hot, dry, waterless and deadly. In the mid-nineteenth century, the ‘Dead Heart of Australia’ became part of the explorers’ and settlers’ vocabulary.
I found this map here on a gorgeous blog called Bibliodyssey, devoted to “books, illustrations, science, history, visual materia obscura, eclectic bookart”, which includes some very curious maps, such as this one.
There’s something strangely unsettling about that map – I felt oddly queasy when I first saw it – a lurch like vertigo. Clearly recognisable, but very, very wrong. It’s the cartographic “Uncanny Valley”.
I love your blog.
Comment by Will — July 8, 2007 @ 12:25 am
This non-existant river reminds me of a world map I saw in a book from the first half of the 20th Century, where the Antarctic Peninsula was separate from the rest of the continent and labelled “North Graham Island”. Has anyone else seen a map like that anywhere?
Comment by Vic — July 9, 2007 @ 8:55 pm
Thanks for the great find. I love your blog, and bibliodyssey as well. This reminds me of the early British maps of Africa, especially John Speeds from the 1620s. Explorers certain that there was a huge lake in the middle of southern Africa (around the convergence of Angola, Zimbabwe,Botswana, Zambia, and Namibia). Also, cartographers slowly invented the Mountains of Kong, a ficitious mountain range stretching through West Africa. It was only proven false after a Westerner actually visited the area. And just like Australia’s Dead Heart, there is Africa’s Heart of Darkness.
How wonderful to look back through maps!
Speed’s map can be found here: http://tinyurl.com/2tccob
Comment by Kate — July 10, 2007 @ 9:55 pm
@Will:
Familiar contours, bizarre interior: I fully understand your bout of cartographic vertigo!
@Vic:
Thanks for that info. Haven’t seen such a map, but would like to…
@Kate:
Great John Speed map! That lake in Southern Africa is named Zaire Lake – Zaire being the ‘native’ name borne by the Dem. Rep. of the Congo when it was ruled by Mobutu.
And the Canaries are also labelled the ‘Fortunate Islands’, which brings back a comment to post #116 on a whole different area, the ‘true North’.
I’m going to look for a nice maps of the Mountains of Kong!
Comment by strangemaps — July 10, 2007 @ 10:13 pm
This map really is a strange sight to an Aussie like myself. The lack of water is one of our nation’s defining feature. Water restrictions are currently in effect, since we’re (hopefully) at the tail-end of a ten-year drought.
Comment by Yak Boy — July 20, 2007 @ 9:00 am
[...] Strange Maps The Americas have the Mississippi and the Amazon, Africa has the Nile and Asia has the Ganges and [...]
Pingback by My Stuff | The Great Australian Inland Sea — July 23, 2007 @ 3:25 am
This is a suspiciously strange map for 1827. Hume and Hovell had already crossed the Murray in 1824, but it’s not shown here. Granted Sturt’s navigation was not complete until 1830.
But the rest of the map doesn’t seem to reflect the “inland sea” debate of the time.
Why the imaginary rivers in the Nullarbor/Great Victoria Desert ? What river mouth excited Maslen in the North West ? Leichardt had yet to cross the northern interior, so why invent those streams ?
As I understand it, the debate hinged on the destination of the many westward-flowing and substantial streams in NSW, and yet they are not emphasised at all.
Comment by Robert — July 23, 2007 @ 7:43 am
This map reminded me of something I’d heard earlier, so I googled around a bit to see if I wasn’t just making up things for myself. Turns out my memory is still pretty decent: There were actually plans to create the “missing lake” in the early 20th century by diverting some large rivers to the “dead heart” of Australia:
http://www.hindu.com/2007/02/27/stories/2007022703941600.htm
Comment by Hiram Abiff — July 29, 2007 @ 12:34 am
luv it….t
Comment by toni — July 30, 2007 @ 7:54 am
Hopelessly misguided according to the standards of our day, but a beautifully drafted chart. It’s well beyond the standards of execution typical of daydreams, such as those Tolkein put inside the cover of ‘Lord of the Rings.’ I came across this chart (not sure I’d call it a map) while doing some research for a song on the myth of the inland sea. So thanks to you, Maslen gets an honourable mention:
Oxley told it, Maslen even drew a chart
Sturt observed the flight of birds, rivers flowed to the great land’s heart.
Comment by Lyndon de Valle — August 7, 2007 @ 1:05 am
There was a sea in the centre of Australia. We just missed it by 150 million years (give or take a decade).
Comment by Deb — August 8, 2007 @ 1:09 pm
[...] Heart of Australia. juga di sini. [...]
Pingback by kolum-kolum « Meniti di Titian Hati — August 22, 2007 @ 12:42 pm
It has also just now occurred to me – Maslen has an inland “delta of Australia”. Very strange. Inland deltas are very rare – and I suspect he did not know the processes which create them: one assumes there is an outflow in the North West !
Comment by Robert — September 30, 2007 @ 8:26 am
[...] ifølge Thomas J. Maslen, via strangemaps. Posted by prebens Filed in [...]
Pingback by Ut på tur, aldri sur! « Preben sin reiseblogg: Australia — January 10, 2008 @ 1:46 pm
In addition to Deb’s note, in the Cenozoic there was another inland sea – even today, the Lake Eyre region has occasional floods. But go back around 35 million years, you’d find flamingoes, freshwater dolphins, stork-legged ducks and more weirdness.
Comment by Finback — February 9, 2009 @ 6:24 am
This map is not all that wierd. You might compare it with Plate F-15 in the book by Nick Short and Robert Blair entitled “Geomorphology from Space”, showing the inland Australian flood of February 6th, 10974. It was not until the advent of satellite imagery that the source of Maslen’s map became apparent.
Comment by Kerry Burns — March 26, 2009 @ 1:14 am
thank you
Comment by Tony — May 4, 2009 @ 2:53 am
thanks for this map..
good
luck
Comment by Solomon — May 11, 2009 @ 7:43 am
merci
Comment by aspicco . — May 17, 2009 @ 5:29 am
teşekkür ederim
Comment by yory — June 12, 2009 @ 9:37 pm
Vielen Dank
Comment by moon — July 3, 2009 @ 4:36 am