The Upsidedown Map Page
It needn't be a Eurocentric world!
It came as a surprise to me after over 20 years of seeing "normal" world maps to come across an upside down one. The most surprising thing was that I found it surprising. It is completely artificial that we have North at the top of a map.
The convention came a few centuries ago when Northern hemisphere, European navigators started using the North star and the magnetic compass. Before that, the top of the map was to the East which is where the word orientation comes from.
Rotated Maps
Then a friend bought me an Australian map that was on sale in Japan. Not only does it have South at the top, but it is also "rotated" so that China, Indonesia and Australia are in the centre rather than Europe and West Africa.
Hard to believe that I'd not only been educated into one stereotype about maps, but even after learning that stereotype had failed to spot the other one.
I'm interested in Upsidedown Maps because they make me rethink the world. It's important to remember that there are people all over it. Since hanging one on my wall I've learnt geography again. You can reevaluate the world from scratch, as if it was a brand new alien landscape.
Indonesia looks like by far the most interesting place from orbit.
McArthur's Universal Corrective Map of the World has a fabulous history, made by an Australian who was tormented for coming from the "bottom of the world". It was the first modern south-up map, published in 1979. Read about it at ODT.
