ABSTRACT
From ink to inundation, this chapter discusses the ways in which the cartographic sciences have shaped spatial representation and landscapes in settler-colonial societies, and how, in turn, landscapes and environments have disoriented, and so de-oriented, the map—specifically along the banks of the river Dyarubbin in NSW, Australia. While considerable research has been undertaken on modes of mapping as decolonial or anti-colonial practice, as well as local forms of mapping drawn from fundamentally different epistemic roots to western conceptions of space, less work has focused on the specifically internal workings of cartographic practice itself as inherently contradictory in a colonial setting, empowered by promises it has neither the ideological consistency nor the territorial authority to claim. Thus, the act of mapping—in and of itself—becomes an accidentally counter-colonial practice (and I am careful here not to claim a decolonial or anti-colonial politics) through the very limitations which give it power.
