Old maps

My family has often drawn maps. Next time I visit them (next time I’m allowed to — what a strange year this became) I need to dig out a pirate map — complete with ominous bullet hole — my father made when I was little. I think it’s in a big Nürnberger gingerbread chest with other childhood treasures.

One of my mother’s sisters was a draughtsperson, and took us on a memorable tour of the Yale plan department when we visited her there (and printed us plans of various buildings, as souvenirs!). My father’s brother got onto a few real actual maps, including in the Northern Territory (below — if you look at neighbouring names you’ll get an idea of the relevant decade) and Antarctica.

When I was pulling together all our map books and atlases to take to some some map illustration workshops, we found a few more:

Here is a treasure map of our house out west, leading to a present for my mother. Whatever it was, we hid it in the bathroom. (The “giant’s causeway” was the stepping stones that led to the outdoor (unplumbed) toilet, so this was before we installed a septic tank and put a new toilet building at the site of the “thorny strait”).

All good maps have a mermaid and a sea-monster.

This one was for a very early (and somewhat culturally unexamined) Peter Pan birthday party for a (now 20-year old!) nephew, held around Lake Burley Griffin in Canberra.

And here are the clues!

Ideas, exercises, lessons:

• All good maps have a mermaid and a sea-monster. If you have been world-building and have not taken this into account, consider redressing your omission. Think laterally if you must, but I see few reason why this cannot be literal. Space mermaids!
• You can use all sorts of locations as a base for a fantastic world. Start with your living room and sketch a map, transpose the details into relevant fantastic locations (is the tissue box a volcano? a fever hospital?) and send a hero on an adventure across it. What perils might they meet? Rough out a quick scene (written or drawn, according to what you do).
  An advantage of this is that many rooms are roughly rectangular and so your world will print nicely onto the opening pages of a novel.
• Converting a house to a fantastic location is one way to occupy time at home. You’ve got the option of a treasure hunt, of course, but you can be quite literal here, too. In fact, one time at college we had meant to go on a picnic, but it rained, so we went to great lengths to recreate a park (duckpond and all) in my room and had the picnic there. As social isolation increases, I’m going to have to work out what I can do to get (more of) a cafe vibe happening in my house.