Imaginary Country Assignment Resources

Assignment 3 Brief here >>

There are further links from the brief and the course outline to help with html, web design and writing for online. We will start working on the project from next week, so come along with some ideas.

Please note the due date is 10.07.06 -- first week of the new semester.

"A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing." Oscar Wilde

Bergonia

Bergonia is a complex and multi-faceted island-continent situated in the North Atlantic Ocean… a multi-party socialist utopia.

"We stand against the worship of things, money, and progress, against frenetic activity, against waste, against mammon," trumpeted the Harmony Alliance chairman Piesha Aziron in 1982, the year her party first attained a majority in Congress. Aziron became Speaker of Congress. "We celebrate a revolution of cabinet-makers and potters, people who earnestly pray, lazy people, hikers, people who enjoy beauty, people who want to take walks at the end of the day. This revolution opposes those who want to keep the bulldozers going day and night."

Bergonia’s name is borrowed from a 50s episode of Superman and has been developing over many years.

Bergonia >>

The Island of Ephemera
An island city whose leading industries are winemaking and bookbinding… Its attractions include a Vegetation Museum, the world's largest flea market, 'Pools of Certitude,' and a natural feature known as the Subterranean Honey Baths. 46% of its citizens are secular humanists. Residents believe that people who don’t read, can’tbe trusted. The description on the glossy travel brochure handed out at New York’s Central Station sounds too good to be true. It was too good to exist. In fact it was a school assignment.

"Can Design Touch Someone's Heart?" taught by the graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister--assigned students to touch a community of people using design. While other students created murals and public-service posters, Spielman decided to bring a moment of levity to morning commuters and hit on the idea of a spoof travel brochure. Amanda Spielman’s project was deemed risky – but had unexpected results. More than 2 dozen people contacted her, wanting to know how they could buy tickets for a holiday on the island. "The best call was from this woman who said her husband is a big game hunter and he's looking for the largest moose he can find and does our island offer anything like that?"
Metropolis Magazine, The Ephemeral City >>
Via BLDGBlog >>
Download PDF brochure >>

Umbagollah
Umbagollah is written as a kind of travel diary / letters home / reference boook / non-linear fiction – the travels of a ypoung woman called Mariel Hatstand. Although not intended as a role-playing site, it has grown to become one.

The population of Umbagollah is quite small, and almost half of it lives in one of the two major cities. Ex is substantially more crowded than Gum Gooloo Gum Jublet, with the seaside port of Jail third and the underground town of Cumber Poidy running a distant fourth. Jail is Cumber Poidy's main point of contact with the mainland. An uncounted number of ferrypeople live on the River Fly. Most other Umbagollians live as farmers around Gum Gooloo or in the North-west Flatlands. Some make their homes in the forest, in the mountains or in the Falling Hills; many of these are mystics, hermits and outcasts.
The Great Big Book of Umbagollah," by Daens Resought, HG, Sc.Ast

Umbagollah >>
Imaginary Countries WebRing >>

Micronations
Micronations – sometimes also referred to as cybernations, fantasy countries, model countries, and new country projects – are entities that resemble independent nations or states, but which are unrecognized by them, and for the most part exist only on paper, on the Internet, or in the minds of their creators.

Micronations also differ from secession and self-determination movements in that they are largely viewed as being eccentric and ephemeral in nature, and are often created and maintained by a single person or family group.

Some micronations have managed to extend some of their operations into the physical world by issuing coins, flags, postage stamps, passports, medals and other items. Such trappings of "real" sovereign states are created as a way of seeking to legitimize the micronations that produce them.

The term "micronation" is a neologism originating in the 1990s to describe the many thousands of small, unrecognised state-like entities that have mostly arisen since that time. The term has since also come to be used retroactively to refer to earlier ephemeral unrecognised entities, some of which date as far back as the early 19th century.

The term "micropatrology" has been used to a limited extent since the 1970s to describe the study of both micronations and microstates. Micronational hobbyists sometimes refer to real sovereign nation-states as "macronations".

Micronations in Australia
Micronational activities were disproportionately common throughout Australia in the final three decades of the 20th century. The still-thriving Hutt River Province Principality was the first manifestation of the phenomenon; it was founded in 1970, when Leonard George Casley declared his farming property independent - and himself "Prince Leonard" - after a dispute over wheat quotas. 1976 witnessed the creation of the Province of Bumbunga on a rural property near Snowtown, South Australia, by an eccentric British monarchist named Alex Brackstone, while a German immigrant named Robert Neuman created the Sovereign State of Aeterna Lucina in 1978 in a hamlet on the New South Wales north coast, before later relocating to a large rural property near Cooma. At around the same time an eccentric anti-taxation campaigner named John Charlton Rudge founded the Duchy of Avram in western Tasmania; "His Grace the Duke of Avram" later went on to become an elected member of the Tasmanian Parliament. In Victoria, a long-running dispute over flood damage to farm properties led to the creation of the Independent State of Rainbow Creek in the state's northeast by Tom Barnes in 1979, and mortgage foreclosure dispute led George and Stephanie Muirhead of Rockhampton, Queensland, to briefly and abortively secede as the Principality of Marlborough in 1993.

Another Australian secessionist state came into existence on 1 May 2003, when Peter Gillies declared the independence of his sixty-six-hectare northern New South Wales farm as the Principality of United Oceania after an unresolved year-long dispute with Port Stephens Council over Gillies's plans to construct a private residence on the property (see United Oceania).

The Gay and Lesbian Kingdom of the Coral Sea Islands is a micronation established in 2004 as a symbolic political protest by a group of gay rights activists based in southeast Queensland Australia.

From Wikipedia on Micronations >>