Names We Left Off the Map

At the State Library of Tasmania, archival researcher Alethea finds four deliberate corrections on an 1830s survey map. Settlements. Water sources. Meeting grounds. Each one removed so completely that the official record insists it never existed.

She expects to uncover another clean act of colonial violence. She wants a perpetrator she can name.

Instead, the altered coordinates lead to William, a British surveyor, and Amaia, the Palawa guide who became his wife. Together they lived in one of the missing places, among families whose coexistence threatened the story the empire needed to tell. When discovery became a death sentence, they made an impossible choice: disappear their own lives from the record.

Now Alethea must decide what restoration means. To return the names could honor the people history denied. It could also undo the protection their erasure was meant to provide.

Some maps show where the world is. This one reveals who survived by vanishing from it.