Many Maps: Charting Two Cultures: First Nations Australians and European Settlers in Western Australia

The title Many Maps, Charting Two Cultures, looks at the way two contrasting societies often misunderstood each other in the western third of Australia. Maps can be drawn and interpreted in different ways. It is possible to map a path through life, find a way through a forest, traverse a desert or chart a sense of self and guide one’s relationship to the natural world.

Australia’s First Nations mapped their world in terms of a spiritual and environmental relationship to country and an animate sense of being. The maps in European heads often explored ways to obtain wealth from the Australian earth. Many Maps traces both misunderstandings, and sometimes sensitive understandings of land and culture in a continent that we both inhabit.