From a quiet room in one of the quietest streets in hilltop Thirroul, a fine black ink pen makes barely a sound as it hits paper - again and again and again ...
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Alex Pescud works in the room with a makeshift easel propped between his lap and his desk. He estimates he has spent 500 hours over this same piece of paper as a breathtaking map of Wollongong takes shape under his hand.
The room may be silent, but the almost-completed map speaks volumes, taking in every intricate detail of the city Pescud loves, from the Norfolk pines on Wollongong foreshore to the specks of raw materials falling into tiny piles at the steelworks.
The 32-year-old cartographer makes maps for a living, but never before by hand.
His is believed to be the first hand-drawn Wollongong map of its kind since the late-1800s.
His project, The Wollongong Map, began three years ago when he met the creator of a Melbourne equivalent at a conference.
He was "blown away" by the homespun qualities of the map and the unique perspective it captured.
"I saw it and for whatever reason connected with that view - like a birdseye view, where you could just see the characteristics of the city all in one encapsulated thing," Pescud told the Mercury.
He went home and bought a big piece of paper, only to cut it up and mothball the project when he made a first attempt and realised, "this is so hard".
He made a second attempt during COVID lockdowns, after he started drawing the struggling businesses of friends to promote them on social media.
People asked him for more drawings - friends' houses, their grandmother's place - and Pescud realised he liked giving the finished products away at the end.
"Every time I'd give it to them it was it wasn't my thing anymore, it was theirs - and I really liked that. I thought this [The Wollongong Map], would be like that, but on a grand scale."
The map shows what Pescud call "the impossible view". It doesn't exists in real life, even if a drone was sent up to capture it.
Using computer software and an online map, he placed a grid over the section of the city he wanted to capture, then set about drawing each cell individually.
He effectively bent or tilted some cells, so their contents were laid flat from an aerial perspective. Pescud took hundreds of photographs of buildings as part of the process of piecing the city's infinite aspects into a single perspective.
"It [the view] doesn't exist in a photo; it's probably a thousand photos," he said.
The painstaking drawing process began first in pencil then again in ink, using skills partly honed in his professional life and partly learned along the way.
Pescud, who has no visual arts background, consulted a book on mountains when it came time to draw the escarpment. He'd Google "how do I draw this so it looks 3D?" and ask an architect friend for tips.
He plans to sell the map in limited and open editions, before donating the original to a museum.
"This is my gift to the city," he said. "It will go on and become something to others."
"When I looked at that Melbourne map, I had so many good memories of Melbourne and thought, 'this one little piece of paper captures so much for me. Wollongong is where I grew up, it's what I love, there's so much opportunity here, I want to do that for someone else'."
The map is nearing completion, with only parts of Mount Pleasant and the UOW campus still to be inked in. That, and maybe a few surprises.
"I think I'll put a few little Easter eggs in there, that I'll let the world find," Pescud said.
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