
Filling in the Map: Exploring Inland Australia
Filling in the Map: Exploring Inland Australia
Carole Wilkinson
Wild Dog Books, 2025
48pp., hbk., RRP $A24.99
9781742036557
When the First Fleet arrived in Australia in 1788 Australia’s First Nations people had already lived on the continent for at least 60,000 years.
Matthew Flinders drew an accurate map of Australia’s coastline, but none existed of inland Australia. Aboriginal people knew their Country in detail without the need for maps. They had a network of tracks across the continent and detailed knowledge of food and water sources. But for the
European settlers Australia was a 7.7 million km2 mystery to solve.
This is how they set about Filling in the Map of Australia.
Using images of people, places and maps sourced through a range of official libraries, archives and museums, younger readers are taken on an historical journey of how this country was explored by Europeans after Captain Arthur Phillip established the first permanent settlement in 1788 in what Captain James Cook had named Port Jackson but which Phillip renamed Sydney. While acknowledging that the Aboriginal people had been here for thousands of years prior to Phillip’s settlement and knew the country intimately with established tracks called Songlines and which the Europeans used, often without consent, this book focuses on those early European explorers beginning with Blaxland, Wentworth and Lawson penetrating the seemingly impenetrable Blue Mountains in 1813 and includes the travels of Hume and Hovell, Charles Sturt, Thomas Mitchell, Edward John Eyre, Leichardt, Burke and Wills, John McDouall Stuart, and Albert Canning offering straightforward factual information of each expedition.
While it provides an overview of the opening up of the continent for future European settlement for the casual reader. teachers’ notes linked directly to the Australian Curriculum History strand, particularly those in Years 3-5, offer ideas that will make it come alive for those students, particularly connecting the past to the present.
It is the ideal companion to its predecessor, Putting Australia on the Map (Wild Dog, 2020) offering not only a peek into the past of this country but also the opportunity to consider how countries were explored and mapped before satellites, drones and other devices and how we actually found our way before Google Maps, satnav and GPS. (It’s only 20 years since my students sat watching our school janitor demonstrate how he found his way on his 4WD expeditions using a handheld GPS device, being fascinated by it and wanting to have a go to pinpoint the school as we asked “Where is Palmerston? as a special assignment for the school website!)
And for those who prefer non fiction, it is the ideal book for this year’s CBCA Book week theme, “Book an Adventure”. What if you were a journalist reporting on one of the expeditions as you accompanied it, particularly if you could timeslip while taking today’s technology with you?