Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Visualising a Temporal Cartography
of Travel
Mick Abbott
Abstract This study asserts that contemporary cultural perceptions of wilderness
have been heavily influenced by topographic cartography. It compares different
historical conceptualizations of wilderness in the cartographies of Aotearoa
New Zealand's Southern Fiordland, and finds that certain tropes have shaped how
the region is now characterized and managed as an unspoilt, remote, threatened and
culturally-empty wilderness. The author argues that this cartography-influenced
understanding of Fiordland has come at the expense of other, experiential and
phenomenological qualities of wilderness relating to participation and performance.
The author explores alternative cartographies of wilderness with a particular
emphasis on phenomenological engagement. Instead of tracing a route onto a
uniform spatial scale, the reverse is attempted: a cartography in which intervals of
time (hours and days) rather than space (metres and kilometres) are elevated as the
primary axis of uniform determination. Then, a topographic representation is
morphed to match these varying rates of travel: the resulting cartography, particu-
larly as subsequent journeys are overlaid, reveals temporal dimensions that are as
folded and contorted as the physically undulating terrain through which such
journeys are made. Corner has critiqued wilderness landscapes as ''nothing more
than an empty sign, a dead event'' (Corner
1999a
, p 156). By contrast, this paper
concludes that a phenomenological cartography may open up—through mapping
wilderness's eidetic and temporal qualities—our capacity to understand wilderness
areas as sites which are rich not only in ecological but also cultural relationships.
