All utopias require mapping, their social order depends upon and generates a spatial order which reorganises and improves upon existing models (Cosgrove 1999: 15-16). This article examines the close relationship between cartography, utopianism and colonial dispossession in 19th century Australia. Critical geographers such as J. B. Harley 1 have transformed our understanding in the last twenty years of the relationship between maps, knowledge and power, drawing attention to the role of maps in

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... e expansion of empires, in preparing the colonists' symbolic appropriation of land, before the explorers had ever trodden the ground. In the case of the writers studied in this article-Thomas J. Maslen (1787-1856) and James Vetch (1789-1869)-their cartography was a tool to appropriate the 'empy continent' of Australia by projecting onto it utopian social and political solutions to problems at home. In constructing their utopias, they drew on a range of resources : maps, grid patterns, nomenclature, iconography and mathematical formulae in order to achieve the ideal divisions of territory and distribution of land that would realise their quest to establish a 'new Britain.' After a brief discussion of the influential work of Edward Gibbon Wakefield (1796-1862), who described the ideal division and distribution of land by applying economic theory and mathematical formulae, the article will focus on two examples of the exercise of utopian thinking through cartography, in the work of Maslen and Vetch.