It took Peter and I nearly five hours to fly from Canberra to Perth some weeks ago. That’s a distance of 3657 kilometres or roughly 38 hours of driving. Distance isn’t something I get hung up over; most country people don’t. We’re use to driving roughly an hour to get to the next place. Yet, even so, it did surprise me that Perth was so far away. It’s one thing to be told Australia is a big country but to understand what “big” means, I had to experience it. Flying continuously for five hours taking a straight line over the Bight, together with the Google fact that our country is almost as wide as it is long, emphasised the meaning of “big country”.
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Some time later we were in Britain staying with friends. And in a discussion on travel and distances, these friends produced a postcard which amazed me and has altered my life long understanding of world geography. Europe, including Britain, Ireland and Scandinavia, can fit into Australia! That same distance, Canberra to Perth, when applied to the European context would take you right out of Europe!
Flying from London you would cross the Atlantic to eastern Canada, or go over the Urals into Siberia, or possibly reach Baghdad in Iraq. Had you flown south, then you would have crossed Morocco and Algeria and landed somewhere in Niger or Mali. Taking a flight from London to Baku on the Caspian Sea in Azerbaijan, for example, your plane would have to cross Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Germany, Austria, Italy, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Bulgaria, Greece, Turkey and out of Europe into Azerbaijan.
At the heart of my geographic understanding lies a map based on the Mercator Projection, developed in 1569. It was a fixture in primary school classrooms when I was young. I accepted the two dimensional presentation of our globe without question. Europe was at the top of the map and its countries were a reasonable size. Taken as a whole, Europe was a big place. Australia was down under, an island, a not-that-big place. And our lack of population (about 25 million) when compared to Europe with its 500 million people, underscored that perceived smallness.
Now, thanks to the Gall-Peters Projector Map I have an improved understanding of Australia’s size. This revolutionary map presents countries in their true proportion to one another, though their actual shape may be a little stretched. To counterbalance any warping go to the interactive True Size website.
Map Sites
- TheTrueSize.Com
- https://www.huffingtonpost.com
.au/2015/09/09/compare-austral ia-size_n_8108198.html - http://www.australiangeographi
c.com.au/topics/history- culture/2011/02/maps-of- australia-charting-our-history - https://www.loc.gov/ghe/cascad
e/index.html?appid=ddf9824ff56 b4fb6a0f3e11515716738&loclr= blogmap