Must Australia Always Be Imaginary?: Cartography as Creation in Peter Carey’s “Do You Love Me?”

"Everything that is not loved will disappear from the face of the earth."-peter Carey, "do You Love Me?"This is the key thematic line oF Peter carey's 1975 short story "do you love Me?" the story is made up of numbered short sections, each with its italicized heading as if it were a type of report-a favorite sci-fi story form-and this report is narrated by a young man. the heading is "The Role of the Cartographers," followed by this line: "perhaps a few words about the role of Cartographers in our present society are warranted (17). ongoing creation by the Cartographers-the word is always capitalized-is essential; thus a key word in that line is "present."The young male narrator then immediately moves on to describe the annual Census. the Census, which takes place during the Festival of the Corn, is meticulous: all possessions are piled outside of every house and counted. this makes the people feel secure. the need for security, to know what it is they possess, is also why the Cartographers are so important, and the young man is proud his father is one of them. But the land is stubbornly enigmatic and parts of it, the nether regions, are fading and disappearing "like the image on an improperly fixed photograph" (19). this upsets people.City buildings, buildings owned by the multinational corporations iCi and Royal dutch shell, then begin to vanish, too, and finally so do people. As they disappear, people become murderously angry when they realize they're vanishing because other people do not love them enough. it becomes clear anyone and anything not sufficiently known and loved will evaporate like morning mist in the glare of the rising sun. the final moment of the story takes place in the young man's lounge room after his father has vanished. His mother turns to him and says, with fear, "do you love me?" (31)At this point, "perhaps a few words about the role of Cartographers in our present society are warranted." the role of the Cartographers is perhaps particularly resonant for non-indigenous Australians. the idea of Australia began as science fiction, as a projection of the european imagination based on scientific principles as they were believed at the time, which was that there had to be a vast southern land to balance the land masses of the northern hemisphere.When ptolemy published his Geographia (ca. 150Ad), he proposed the hypothetical continent of Terra Australis nondum cognita, the south Land not yet known. terra Australis then remained a site of speculation and fantasy imagined by scientists, explorers, cartographers, and writers over centuries, as in the 1572 map above (Fig. 1) in which the imagined continent takes up nearly a third of the globe. Here is an instance where the map, or actually many maps, do literally precede the territory. More importantly, these maps drive the search for the territory itself; they help bring that territory into being.these maps are part of the process of creating Terra Australis Incognita in the evocative phrase used by cosmographer Johannes schoner on a 1533 globe: Terra Australis recenter inventa sed nondum plene cognita (Southern land found recently but not fully known)-the process of bringing this imagined science fictional continent, this land whose existence is, for europeans, born of fantasy and speculation, into focus.Aside from the well-known references to the antipodes in works by writers such as Marlowe and dante, david Fausett has described an entire seventeenth century cycle of novels of imaginary voyages which enclose detailed accounts of the utopias/ dystopias found in the unknown southern continent. As Fausett says, "the south-land was more than a real frontier; it was the last major notional exterior, or generator of collective difference (175)". He notes the power of the unknown south land as a literary device was not lessened by its partial discovery; indeed the effectiveness of its use in political allegories seemed to be enhanced (177). …