Australia & New Zealand Map 1889 Regional Print - Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland, Wellington

Heinrich Kiepert, the Berlin scholar-cartographer, drew this map of Australia and New Zealand in 1889 as sheet 32 of his Neuer Hand-Atlas über alle Theile der Erde, published by Dietrich Reimer in Berlin, and it was bound into the revised second edition of 1891. Kiepert was counted among the leading scholarly mapmakers of the later nineteenth century, and he had designed maps for the Berlin Society for Geography, so the atlas reads as a working reference rather than a showpiece. This sheet is outline hand-colored and engraved by H. Herzberg, with relief in hachures, and it stands out for its German-language title, its two prime meridians, Paris above and Ferro below, and the dates of discovery printed around the Australian coast. It is a regional map of two lands, drawn when Australia was still a group of separate British colonies and New Zealand a colony of its own.

The mainland is divided by color into Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia, the colonial boundaries of the day. Victoria, whose capital Melbourne was then among the largest cities of the British Empire, was in the last flush of a land boom that would collapse within a few years, while New South Wales held Sydney, the oldest settlement. South Australia, with its capital at Adelaide, administered the Northern Territory from afar, and Western Australia, the largest colony by area, was a year away from self-government. New Zealand appears with its major islands and cities, the volcanoes of the North Island and the Southern Alps of the South Island giving the country its backbone. The sheet labels the Indian Ocean, the Pacific Ocean and the Arafura Sea, and it also carries the name Silent Sea.

Descendants of the German settlers who built the Barossa Valley towns of South Australia, and anyone in the German-speaking world with ties to Australia or New Zealand, will recognize a familiar atlas language here, which makes it a distinctive gift for a family reunion or a move. TheMapVault's Stanford 1882 and Cram 1925 maps of Australia are British and American sheets with English lettering; this Berlin edition was drawn by a continental scholar, is labeled in German, and puts both countries on one page. Like every print in the collection, it ships unframed and is available in a full range of sizes, from a compact desk piece to a large-format statement print.