Oceania & Fiji Map 1912 Regional Print - Sydney, Auckland, Perth, Hobart, Suva

W. and A.K. Johnston, the Edinburgh map house founded by Alexander Keith Johnston, engraved, printed and published this map of Oceania in March 1912 as page 40 of Keith Johnston's General Atlas, a world atlas of 54 maps in the Royal Atlas of Modern Geography tradition. Johnston's maps were prized for their authority and their clean, close engraving, and this sheet at 1:25,000,000 outlines countries and districts in color and shows relief in hachures. Its distinguishing feature is four insets, one each for Western Australia, Tasmania, the Viti or Fiji Islands and the Eastern Extremity of New Guinea, which pull the far corners of the region into one page. It is a regional map of Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific, drawn in 1912 when Australia was eleven years a Commonwealth and the islands to its north and east were still divided among European empires.

The insets each carry a distinct story. Western Australia, the Commonwealth's largest state, is shown with its capital Perth on the Swan River, while Tasmania, whose capital is Hobart, is drawn as its own island state. The Fiji Islands, a British colony since 1874, are shown under their native name Viti, and the colony's capital had moved from Levuka to Suva in 1882 as the sugar economy grew. The eastern end of New Guinea belonged to Papua, an Australian territory since 1906. The main sheet places all four alongside Australia and New Zealand, labeling cities, islands and landmarks across the South-West Pacific.

A Fijian-Australian family, a Pacific historian, or a collector of Edinburgh atlas houses will find a fitting gift here, perhaps for a family reunion or a retirement. TheMapVault's 1958 Times Atlas sheet of Australia and the South-West Pacific carries island insets of its own, drawn half a century later at much larger scale, while Black's 1849 New Zealand and Kiepert's 1889 Berlin map each look at one or two countries rather than the whole region. Johnston's 1912 sheet is the one that brings Fiji and New Guinea into view alongside the colonies of Australia and New Zealand. 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.