One possible Mad Max geography
Amongst Mad Max fans, there seems to be wide fanon agreement about the geography of the first three Mad Max movies: that they are located in southeastern Australia. Fury Road is more disconnected from actual-Australia, both in its degraded environment and in its dramatic scenery, filmed partly in the dunes of Namibia. Where can this fit relative to the other Mad Max locations in a post-apocalyptic Australia?
We do have this this Fury Road map from the filmmakers:
which ought to be, somehow, embedded in the larger continent.
My solution to this is here. This is the map I use when I’m writing my Mad Max fics (any locations that make you go ??? = in my ‘verse, no worries mate).
i’ve gone with the occasionally seen fanon of having Bartertown near Adelaide.
Triumvirate Territory - the Citadel, the Bullet Farm, and Gas Town - I’ve placed this in the Pilbara region of Australia. That area has a geological resource concentration, strips of hills and mountains running north to south, and the red-stone ochre gorgeousness we see in MM:FR. And having it here makes room for...
The Salt - for me, this goes in the middle of Australia. During global warming/sea level rise, that’s where sea level rise floods in. There’s a very detailed fan discussion of ‘sea level rise vs. sea level fall’ and ‘is the Salt a dried up seabed?’ here. Some think the Mad Max world is devastated by warming, others that it’s cooling. Either approach has sea-level consequences.
Does having the Salt in central Australia represent the vast distances inferred by Max’s 160 days of nothing but salt? (Remember, it’s not Max, but Furiosa who first names ‘the Salt’ as a distinct area). It can take 260 days to walk from Australia’s east coast to its west coast, and it often takes around 160 days to walk from the south coast to the northern coast. Take away reliable roads and you greatly increase driving times. For me, this is enough of an expanse of sere, salty terrain for Max to be skeptical about crossing it and surviving. In my Wasteland it’s more sensible to try a Salt crossing along the cooler, more inhabited southern coast.
This other, beautifully done fan Mad Max map is a lot more thorough with movie locations (such as Fat Nancy’s Cafe). It places Triumvirate Territory in central Australia, which also has a solid geological resource basis.
