No matter how many armies you build up in Risk, you can't invade New Zealand.

We gave the world Lorde, Russell Crowe, Ernest Rutherford, Sir Edmund Hillary, Bruce McLaren, the All Blacks, Peter Snell, Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, and UN power broker Helen Clark - to name just a few.

Hell, last month we even graciously agreed to take a temporary seat on the UN Security Council - that's how important we are. Our Prime Minister likes to tell us we punch above our weight and when she was US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton said we punched "WAY" above our weight.

Despite this proof of our own importance, outsiders keep leaving New Zealand off their maps. Which raises the existential question: "If a country doesn't appear on a map, is it really there?"

The United Nations doesn't seem aware of us.

Examples of this disquieting tendency to exclude us from pictures or globes of the world is catalogued on a tumblr, matter-of-factly titled World Maps Without New Zealand.

The selection includes the map - sans New Zealand - on the enormous purple backdrop at the Nuclear Security Summit in The Hague this year, under which Prime Minister John Key had to pose with other foreign leaders. To add to the ignominy, themap even had a line which appeared to represent Tasmania.

Like many other maps it included other small island nations such as Japan, the United Kingdom and the Philippines. Is it really any excuse that those places have many more people than we do?

A map from the Daily Mail charting violent extremists and gangs seems oblivious to our existence.

In many cases New Zealand would be right on the edge of the maps, so possibly themap makers ran out of interest before getting to us. A far better attitude is displayed on one of the tumblr selection which puts this country on both edges. One mapappears to show just the South Island.

Occasional maps have an empty space close to the centre where we should be. Some some people seem to think Australia is the only country that matters in this part of the world.

A world map logo at the UN office in Geneva also manages to leave out New Zealand, Seeing as we virtually run that organisation nowadays, a correction to such a historical slight is surely only a short time away.

Being an incognito state is not without its benefits. In world domination game Risk no one can invade us, the Pentagon has no use for us - apart form perhaps a tiny piece of the deep south, extremist organisations may be unaware of us, and no one else knows about the state of our energy reserves.

Leaving us off a map promoting the Rugby World Cup, however, does not mean other teams can get away without playing us.

Without too much effort it is possible to see the nefarious hand of that den of iniquity Hollywood behind the attempt to deny our existence.

In one of the most egregious examples of historical distortion, Ben Affleck suggested our guys in Teheran were cowards, when the truth is they took big risks to help protect US embassy staff.

And don't get me started on the Clint Eastwood/Matt Damon's distortion of the truth in the portrayal of South Africa's victory in the 1995 Rugby World Cup. Everyone knows the All Blacks only lost because Suzie the waitress poisoned them.