PRICELESS MAP

IMAGO MUNDI

A RECENTLY recovered map of Australia dating back to the 17th century has finally been restored and put on display in Canberra. Called Archipelagus Orientalis (Eastern Archipelago) the map was created by master cartographer Joan Blaeu in

1663.

Discovered in a storage unit in Sweden in 2010, the map is one of the rarest in the world and was purchased by the National Library of Australia in 2013. An 11 person team from the Grimwade Centre for Cultural Materials Conservation, University of Melbourne, spent over 1000 hours painstakingly restoring the 354-year-old map.

Known as the Blaeu map, it is significant because it's the first to present most of the Australian coastline in detail, and because it was created more than a hundred years before British explorer Captain James Cook made his famous voyages through the region in the 1770s.

This map of "New Holland", as it was called back then, measures 1185mm by 1520mm, and was drawn using many of the measurements made by the Dutch East India company whose main purpose was trade, exploration and colonisation throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. The map includes the first sightings of Tasmania by Abel Tasman's crew aboard the Zeehaen in 1642. Blaeu's map will be on display as part of the museum's Mapping Our World exhibition in the National Library's Treasures Gallery until next year.

Watch the restoration: https://pursuit. unimelb.edu.au/articles/restoring-one-ofthe-world-s-rarest-maps

See map: http://nla.gov.au/nla.obj232510007/view THE oldest known world map is the Babylonian Map of the World known as the Imago Mundi. This map dates back to the 5th century BCE. Found in southern Iraq in a city called Sippar, the clay tablet map shows a small part of the world as the Babylonians knew it centuries ago.