Mapping Australia: Cinematic cartographies of (Dis)location

What stories do the maps in Baz Luhrmann's film, Australia (2008), tell? Deployed in most films to establish a "national geography", maps can also question the very boundaries that they depict. Filmed maps serve to locate and fix places and people at the same time as they mobilise, thereby introducing notions of dislocation and relocation. While cinematic cartography locates the film narrative, it also asks audiences to consider where they are in the narrative and in doing so reminds them that they are not where the map says it is taking place and that the story that is said it be there is, in fact, nowhere. Or perhaps, elsewhere. From a perspective of cinematic cartography this article invites a consideration of the relationship of the screen image to time, place, space and mobility by examining the points at which the maps inscribed in Australia reveal a transnational cinema. These maps, it is argued, offer itineraries allowing us to trace cultural flows as they travel to and from global, national and local cinemas, revealing the geopolitical milestones that map notions of home and away.