I’m working on something, which I’m calling the ‘Brisbane Map of Victoria’. The idea is to recognize the extensive acknowledgement of Queen Victoria, which has been sustained into the 21st century in Brisbane. In order to create this map, I am treating the index of a substantial biography of Queen Victoria as an index of Brisbane’s street directory. It’s a big job for me, and I’m only up to ‘C’ so far, so that map is still some distance away, yet.
Today’s offering is a complementary piece of work to the bigger task. It feeds into the discussion re-naming streets.
The memorialisation of Victoria’s life and Empire was so popular in Brisbane, that many characters, who feature in the biography to which I am referring (by Elizabeth Longford, 1964), made numerous appearances in the map of Brisbane. Many of these repeated street names have been subsequently re-named. This map is based on some work which has been kindly shared by Kerry Raymond.
Although my contribution here may contain my own errors and omissions, it should be accurate enough to guide us a little further. My hope is that it might help us to improve the questions we bring to our attempts to understand and articulate where we have come from as a people. Who ‘we’ are and where ‘we’ come from is a subject of heated public debate at the moment.
Obviously, not every time one of these names which appears on the map, is a link to the memorialisation of Queen Victoria and her Empire. However, seeing them in this context may shed new light on something of interest.
Feel free to highlight errors, suggest corrections, or more detail. (Thanks to CartoDB for the free access to their mapping software for this little experiment.)
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