Playing with Maps

I came across this map of the rebel colonies divided into fifty states of equal population, and thought of doing one for Australia, but realised most of the fifty states would be too small to see on the map. then I thought I would divide Australia into fifty states with the same relative populations as the existing states of the rebel colonies, but that didn't look very pretty either, as even a California-sized proportional chunk of the Australian population is too small to cover Sydney or Melbourne. So I did the more logical thing, and divided Australia into six states of equal population with the aid of the Australian Electoral Commission's map of electoral districts, leaving the territories as they are.

The only benefit of this cockamamie proposal is that it puts the AFL-playing areas of NSW into a majority AFL state, giving three AFL and three League states, which would make for a more interesting State of Origin Competition. We could have a meta-Grand Final where the winners of the two State of Origin Competitions played each other at soccer. I guess there is one other benefit in that it puts the ACT in between two states instead of entirely surrounded by one, which is tidy. Other than that there is not much to recommend this proposal.

The other thing I thought of doing was inverting my first idea. Instead of dividing Australia into fifty states with the same relative populations as the American states, I would divide the rebel colonies into pieces of the same relative population as the Australian states. With the aid of the wikipedia commons map of the county boundaries, I got this.

I wanted to make Alaska and Hawaii the Northern Territory, but they don't have enough people, and dividing it into three pieces seemed ugly, so I did the next best thing and slotted it appropriately between Queensland, Western Australia, and South Australia. The main bits of Hawaii and Alaska I have therefore associated with New South Wales, as grossly inflated cloned analogues of Lord Howe Island. I probably should have dragged in the more farflung Pacific and Carribean possessions of the rebel colonies to map our territories onto, but my calculations were already dreadfully far along by the time I thought of it.