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Article: Australia--one land: two peoples.
- Article from:
- Contemporary Review
- Article date:
- August 1, 2003
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2003 Contemporary Review Company Ltd. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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NATURE periodically reminds Australians just how fragile their hold on the land is. The country's Indigeneous Peoples have always had a keen awareness of this but the Europeans have had a greater confidence in their ability to tame the land. Are the Indigenous Peoples being proved right?
Australia is a great deal larger than it appears on most maps of the world. Most maps use the Mercator projection (named after Gerardus Mercator, 1512-1594, a Flemish cartographer and mathematician), that is an orthomorphic map projection on which parallels and meridians form a rectangular grid, with the scale being exaggerated with increasing distance from the equator. This ...