Abstract
Since 1511, recurrent couplings of fact and fantasy have constituted the European invention, naming, regionalization, and mapping of the fifth part of the world, known as Oceania after 1816. Using comparative critique of maps as historical texts, this paper investigates the relative balance of actuality and teleology in cartography’s varied graphic realization or anticipation of scientific, imperial, racial, colonial, and national visions. I range across the representational gamut from portolan charts and local surveys to the regional and global syntheses they underpin. Portolan maps and surveys are the largely empirical outcomes of located technical expertise, often in dialogue with indigenous guides or intermediaries. Mappa mundi are the teleological products of science in the service of geopolitics, often embodying strategic misdirection (e.g., the long elision, 1606-1770, of the strait named for Torres) and more or less fervid imaginings (e.g., the erratic cartographic spectre of Terra Australis incognita). Regional maps occupy the ground between, at once pragmatic, synoptic, and prescriptive and sometimes inflected by indigenous presence. Seeking both to expose and foil teleology, I outline successive vignettes of the fifth part of the world or Oceania as mapped around 1650, 1750, 1850, 1910, and 2010. By adopting an existential stance that suspends knowledge of outcomes and leaves space for thinking other futures, I show how uneasy liaisons of empirical observation and deductive reasoning literally coloured Euro-American maps, culminating in the appropriated colonial palimpsest underlying modern maps of Oceania’s nations 

Bronwen Douglas é Professora Associada Jubilada afiliada à Australian National University, onde investigou e ensinou durante 16 anos. Especialista em história e antropologia do Pacífico, tem trabalhado sobre as relações entre raça, geografia e encontros interculturais. É autora de Across the Great Divide (Harwood Acad. Publishers, 1998) e Science Voyages, and Encounters in Oceania 1511-1850 (Palgrave, 2014). Co-organizou (com Chris Ballard) o livro Foreign Bodies: Oceania and the Science of Race 1750-1940 (ANU E Press, 2008).