Joe McKenzie Has Stolen Your Cat

Somewhat of a writer obsessed with politics, history and camomile tea.

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This figure from Ken Jennings’ “Maphead” shows places with similar shapes.

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I legitimately nerdgasmed to this

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I'm up at the National Young Writers' Festival in Newcastle next week and I found out that Australia's queen of zine Vanessa Berry is hosting a workshop on creative cartography. Well that worked out rather nicely.

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Where to from here?

Now that I have my GPS co-ordinates I have to make some fairly large decisions in the next few weeks. I figured that I would list them. -What will the map look like (I have a designer, she is awesome) -How much do I write for each location? -Do I use the back of the map? If so, how? Potential ideas: -History of the area (personal and otherwise) -Getting around/ where to eat -Locator Maps (puts large map in context) -How do I make this project more literary? It needs narrative. -How will I distribute it? -What will it look like in the exhibition that my class is putting on.

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A classmate put me on to this free map of the Chippendale/Redfern area that has a beautiful design and great production values.

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I made 38 markers, this is what they look like on a map. There's a nice geographic spread to them. These markers are in csv format so that they can be transferred into any spreadsheet and even projected on to Google Maps.

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The view across the river now looks at the apartment buildings of Rhodes, but when I was young it was all mangroves and industrial sites. The river itself is dark and foul, it's jam packed with heavy metals from the Navy ship-building yard that used to be where the apartments are now.

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This was the field where I scored the winning try in the 2002 PSSA Oztag grand final. We were up against Putney Public School and the game was so close that it went into extra time. With two minutes left to go I got a dream pass from our star centre and scored; it remains my greatest sporting achievement.

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There's a series of storm-water canals that empty into the Parramatta river, and two years ago they found a mutilated body in a suitcase in this one. What fascinated me about this event was that the murder was committed in Ashfield, so the murderer drove at least fifteen minutes to choose this place to dump the body.

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These are the netball courts, where a group of eccentric men used to race petrol driven remote control cars on a Sunday afternoon. The roar of their tiny engines would echo around the park and when I was a kid those men seemed incredibly cool. I felt similarly about a group that would do Historical Re-enactment fight scenes in the park. One of the drawbacks of adulthood is that those sorts of activities end up seeming less appealing.

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The day of my year twelve formal I sat on this rock for hours reading American Psycho. In retrospect that must have scared the crap out of anyone who walked past, but it was peaceful and quiet.

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Yesterday was to coordinates mapping day. I used an app on my iPad called GPS tracker to mark down locations that I had particularly strong memories of and took photos. I won't post all of them because the photos that I took in the app are oddly very hard to use outside the map, but I will give you some indication of what these places look like.

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In all of this I have been thinking back to Walter Benjamin's work on flanerie, both because slowly walking around an urban environment has become a central part of my work for this project and also because I have a tendency to reference at least one Walter Benjamin work in each assignment I do.

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An XKCD comic about map projections. For the record I am a Winkel-Tripel sort of guy.

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District 6 still looks creepy and empty on a modern day tourist map of Cape Town that I have. I love the shadowed roads that represent where streets used to be.

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Map drawn from memory

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I love this

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By the way this clip from the West Wing totally justifies my long term love of maps and why they are important.

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This was another piece at CarriageWorks called 'In Fact We All Live on an Isolated Island' by Zhou Wendou. It's actually a world map cut up and shaped into a single island, I love the way it intervenes with one map to create another.