As a test, Anthony Stephens likes to ask “anybody under 30 years old who lives in the city” to name the suburb directly to the north of where they live.
“It is interesting the answers you get,” Mr Stephens said.
Our modern dependency on GPS has certainly challenged the cartographer, who has made and sold paper maps for more than 50 years.
His business, The Map Shop, used to produce Adelaide’s street directories.
“We stopped printing those four years ago. You will never see a new Fuller’s street directory again,” Mr Stephens said.
Prior to COVID, 40 per cent of his business was overseas maps. He has sold 10 in the past nine months.
The message that his product is dying doesn’t scare him. He has heard it before.
First at a map conference in the 1970s, where it was predicted that there would be “no such thing as maps” by 1990.
“And then I attended another conference in San Diego in the 1990s and their message was there would be no maps by the year 2000,” Mr Stephens said.
Fortunately the shop has been able to fill some of the gap in demand with an increase in local and domestic maps, alongside its longstanding clients looking for topographical maps for commercial, emergency, or farming purposes.
Why maps are important
More than providing a route to travel or indicating where to find the nearest service station, Mr Stephens says maps are an important factor in human empathy.
“What’s the use of listening to the news of doom and gloom if you don’t know where the doom and gloom is in relation to you?” Mr Stephens said.
“It’s as simple as that.”
He has genuine concerns for young people who don’t use maps, or know how.
He says maps are also an important record of time.
“[With] everything going online, there is then not a snapshot in time. We’re going to become the forgotten generation.”
One of the shop’s most popular items is a 100-year-old map of Adelaide, which features things like the Sir Ross Smith landing area.
“Of course all those maps were done under ‘plane tabling’, which involved a man going on top of a hill … triangulating the major features, then going to another hill and checking the coordinates and then sketching between them.”
A modern day cartographer
What Mr Stephens once made by hand is now done with computers.
“We used to be known as plastic scratchers because we would actually work over a light table on a material where you would actually scratch out the plastic to mark out the roads and contours and drainage,” Mr Stephens said.
“It still takes the same time to make the maps but the updating is a lot easier for us.”
It is online mapping that has allowed modern-day cartographer Alex Broers to develop his love of art, culture and fantasy into a profitable business.
He hand draws “bespoke” maps, recreating Australian destinations that resemble maps of The Lord of the Rings’ Middle Earth.
Map making an art and a science
In the middle of COVID, Mr Broers started his business Cartography Chronicles in response to commercial interest online.
While it’s always preferable to travel to the places he’s recreating, the process can be done from his home in Darwin.
“I’m very lucky that we have the internet these days and a lot of the resources that I need to actually make the maps are also online.”
It’s still a long process though.
While the geographical points are accurate, some features — the mountain ranges in particular — are enlarged.
“Obviously they’re not in proportion to real life purely because if they were you’d have a little ‘x’ on a map or a few contour lines.
“With my work I really wanted to bring to the forefront the geography of each region.”
Sentimental attachment
Mr Broers is continually taken aback by the interest in — and emotional attachment to — his work.
“I think it’s a real testament that Australians in general are very attached and proud of where they come from,” he says.
While Mr Broers’s maps may not be made for navigation, they do evoke a personal reference for people.
The future of map making
While Mr Broers’s personal style of map making may be keeping the art of cartography alive, Mr Stephens hopes traditional topographical maps will continue into the future.
“[Companies] … like Google rely on that base data so you can have your electronic version. If that base data is not being developed then your electronic data is going to get out of date as well,” Mr Stephens said.
“How can you develop a country if you haven’t got up-to-date maps?”
It’s a skill Mr Broers appreciates too.
“I do feel like it’s a slowly dying art because of GPS, Google Maps and everything else [but] I still think there’s a need for those handmade accurate maps.”
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