What is a map?
Maps come in all shapes, sizes and forms! Throughout history, maps have been used by many different people as a tool to figure out where to go, or to picture what places looked like. But today, maps can be as easy as looking at an app on your phone!
This video will introduce students to different kinds of maps, from possum skin cloak maps used by First Nations Australians to incomplete maps of the world drawn by European explorers.
Australian National Maritime Museum
Discussion questions
A: First Nations possum skin cloaks are a big cloak made up of lots of possum skins sewn together. Sometimes, these cloaks are given to babies when they’re born, and more possum skins are attached as the baby grows. They’re great at keeping you warm – but on the other side of the fur is a map!
The map can show Country, and can include landmarks, like rivers and bushland, or animals and plants native to Country.
Sailors and cartographers (or map makers) may have been asked to create maps of places they’d never travelled to, or only seen from a distance. So they often drew in what they think they saw, or sometimes even guessed!
This is because before the age of GPS and satellites, maps were made by people using tools and instruments to draw in coastlines and landmarks that they saw for real. For example, Europeans didn’t know that mainland Australia was made up of one continent (plus the island of Tasmania and some smaller islands in the Torres Strait) until it was charted by Matthew Flinders and Bungaree in 1802 (find out about this voyage in the Flinders and Bungaree module!)
A: charts
A: Stick charts, like the ones made by people in the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean helped navigators find their way whilst sailing on the ocean. Shells represent the position of islands, and the curve and position of the sticks show the currents and movement of the water. A skilled navigator would use information from these charts, and combine it with their knowledge and experience of the ocean to find their way.
A: Bathymetry is the study and mapping of the ocean floor. This information helps scientists to predict changes in climate and understand marine ecosystems. It also helps with advanced navigation of boats and vessels on the water.
Since diving to the bottom of the ocean to see the hills and valleys on the ocean floor is really difficult, some parts of the bottom of the ocean are a big mystery. Scientists use sonar (sound waves), that are transmitted from special boats, and they analyse these to create a 3D map of the sea floor.
The world is a very big place, but a map helps us to see large areas at one time. A map is a drawing of a large area on a smaller scale.
All maps must include BOLTSS: B = border, O = orientation (north arrow), L = legend (key), T = title, S = scale and S = source.
Draw a map of your school that includes these features. Can you set a navigation challenge for a friend? You could get them to use a compass, landmarks in the playground and take measurements to find a treasure!