‘The thing which is not’: Mapping the Fantastic History of the Great Southern Continent

This essay explores mental journeys that probe the edges of knowledge and experience. Edges are inherently paradoxical and perplexing, marking both safety and danger, access and containment. In the context of travel, maps can be central to the process of ‘locating’ places in the geographical and literary imagination; but cartography is also a practice that exposes where our knowledge begins and ends. Inevitably, there remains the question of what lies beyond the ‘edge’, outside the map of known places. This essay asks the question: how do we deal with terrae incognitae — the unknown or ‘empty’ spaces on the map?