Visualising a temporal cartography of travel

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, particularly 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.