‘To be faraway, someplace else’: my endless fascination with maps

Last week I bought a map. Two, actually, both canvas-backed classroom wall charts, artefacts from another time, purchased from a retired art teacher who had worked in schools in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Darwin, Nauru and Port Moresby. Her travelling days over, she no longer needed them. Nor do I, really, but once seen, the desire was like others might have for a pair of shoes, or a Thermomix, or a carbon fibre-framed Sunday morning bicycle.

We all have our foibles. One of mine is maps. Maybe it’s Stockholm syndrome. In this age of lockdown, being grounded and going nowhere in particular, the idea of travel takes on other meanings, deeper longings. As a Facebook friend suggested, anyone missing airports could visit an IKEA checkout: signage is in two languages, there are crowds, queues and lounges, although beware returning home with storage solutions and coat hangers.

Others share past travel memories: photographs of places been, reminiscing on how life once was, when hotel quarantine might be two weeks in a gated resort somewhere in South-East Asia. Buffet breakfasts – oh, how they’re missed. None of us can surely ever complain again about airline food.

The world was our oyster. Now it’s more a clam, and we cope with closed borders and cabin fever as best we can, which is to say, we peddle droll humour. Seen the meme about travel 2021 style? Under “expectations”, there’s a photo of the Sydney Opera House; under “reality” is an image of plates and bowls stacked Jørn Utzon-esque on a kitchen drying rack.

Beyond Zoom meetings and online conferences, we travel in other ways: in our minds, in memory, fiction, humour, in songs or art or whatever else removes us from our current stasis. I was reminded of this altered reality when visiting a friend and his two young boys recently, when I spotted a Tintin comic book on a table. As a child, on a farm outside a country town far from anywhere, my father returned with Tintin adventures whenever he visited the city, and it was like Christmas each time. Tintin travelled to Tibet, to America, to the Black Island, on Flight 714 to Sydney – and wherever he went I tagged along.

My eyes were opened to the world through the exploits of the indomitable reporter. Each book was a kind of map-making, and it’s no coincidence many years later as a jobbing writer that I often took myself away to pen travel stories. I wandered and wrote. About Lapland, Nantucket, Sicily, plodding up the highest active volcano on earth (Cotopaxi in Ecuador, if interested), venturing down the Nile in Egypt, walking to the southernmost point of the Australian mainland to pee off the end.

All of it was marvellous, much of it was prompted by maps. To be curious about maps is to be curious about life. Routinely, I get lost in their folds, in the intrigue of a flat projection brought to life, of places unseen. As a teenager, I’d catch a train into the city to buy topographic map sheets – one centimetre to a kilometre – then, with schoolmates, catch a train to north-east Victoria, hitchhike into the mountains, then walk with our packs to see a high country only imagined in class.

In a map’s coded visual language, in its scale and contours, there’s shared knowledge, but also a deeply personal kind of cartography.

Years later, while living in a share house in Sydney, I opened an atlas and traced the headwaters of the Ganges. Soon enough, I found myself there, trudging up a glacier high in the Himalayas to the Chinese border. Where there’s a will there’s a way, especially before children.