The Dutch East India Company (VOC) Tasman Map and Australia: Competing Interests, Myth Making, and an Australian Icon
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The floor of the entrance to the Mitchell Library vestibule, which is part of the State Library of New South Wales, displays a stunning mosaic 1939-1941 reproduction of a seventeenth century map recording Abel Tasman’s two journeys of 1642 and 1644. It charts the west, north and southern coasts of the Australian continent, but is incomplete, thus representing the historical moment between an imagined Terra Australis Incognita, and the final survey of the east coast which presaged British colonisation. The original Tasman map, also held by the Mitchell library and currently undergoing restoration, has a strange and chequered biography. This paper explores the myths associated with what is known colloquially as the Bonaparte Tasman map, in honour of its last owner Prince Roland Bonaparte, a nephew of Napoleon. We examine its contested origins and role as an agent of Dutch East India Company imperial ambitions, relegation to forgotten cast-off when that empire collapsed, Bonaparte’s desire to gift it to the nascent Australian Commonwealth as a symbol of new nationhood, and the international subterfuge involved in its acquisition by not by the nation, but the State Library of NSW. Analysis of what was known of the map in the decades prior to its arrival in Australia challenges the conventional narratives, and we propose the biography of the Tasman map (and its embodiment in the Mitchell Library vestibule mosaic) is a study in imperialism, colonialism, federation, and power.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".