Der Planungsatlas von Australien

Summary

This article examines the institutional background, development, content, and significance of planning cartography in Australia, with particular emphasis on the Atlas of Australian Resources. Under the federal constitution, responsibility for spatial and regional planning remained largely with the six states, while the Commonwealth influenced national development indirectly through taxation, credit, import regulation, research funding, and support for projects exceeding state capacities. Surveying and mapping were likewise divided among federal military and civil agencies and state land departments. Although this arrangement produced excellent topographic maps for selected areas, comprehensive and methodologically consistent thematic representations of the entire continent remained scarce before the Second World War. Wartime and post-war industrialization, together with Australia’s transition from an agrarian economy toward an industrial one, created an urgent need for coordinated inventories and maps of physical, social, and economic resources. Ministerial conferences in 1944 and 1946 therefore promoted the division of each state into Regions for Decentralization and Development. Regional committees, surveys, monographs, atlases, and thematic map series subsequently appeared in Tasmania, Victoria, New South Wales, the Murray Valley, and other areas. These initiatives deepened knowledge of Australia’s environments and economies, even though regionalism later lost some prominence as national problems of mining, industry, agriculture, infrastructure, and population growth intensified. At the Commonwealth level, research undertaken by the Department of National Development culminated in the Atlas of Australian Resources, conceived as an authoritative and expandable cartographic basis for planning. The article reviews its production methods and major thematic sheets, including drainage systems, surface- and groundwater resources, soils, vegetation, agricultural production, livestock distribution, forests, population distribution and change, energy and fuels, roads, aerodromes, railways, administrative areas, and major development projects. It highlights cartographic techniques that combine area colors, dots, proportional circles, diagrams, line symbols, and relief to relate natural conditions to economic activity and demographic patterns. Particular attention is given to the atlas’s synthesis of information supplied by numerous scientific and administrative bodies and to its effort to present complex national data in a clear, comparable form. The article concludes that high-quality maps require the coordinated application of science, art, and technology and cannot be judged by immediate commercial profitability. State-supported cartography performs a fundamental public function by creating durable documents for rational development. Unlike texts or statistical tables, maps permit rapid general or selective comparison, helping decision-makers identify risks, avoid maladministration, allocate resources, and prepare long-term projects. For a sparsely populated continent undergoing industrial transformation and needing to manage population growth and apparently abundant but finite resources, the Atlas is therefore valuable not only for Australian policy, but also for international cooperation, scholarship, and education.