New South Wales & Western Australia Map 1834 Regional Print - Sydney, Newcastle, Wollongong, Perth

Henry Teesdale, the London map publisher who was an early Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, elected in 1830, issued this detailed engraved map of the Colony of New South Wales in London in 1834. Teesdale had partnered with John Hordan and William Colling Hobson until 1832, then worked on his own and with engravers such as John Crane Dower, and he was successful enough to be registered as a partner in the Royal Bank of Scotland in 1845. The sheet includes a number of early counties, a large inset of the Swan River Settlement and a small map of the whole of Australia, which makes it a double regional map of two colonies. It was drawn in 1834, when New South Wales was a convict colony governed by Sir Richard Bourke and the Swan River colony was only five years old.

The early counties record the official districts into which the settled part of New South Wales was divided, with Cumberland around Sydney at the heart. Sydney, founded in 1788 on Port Jackson, was by 1834 a town of convicts, free settlers and expanding wool exporters, and the pastoral frontier was already pushing beyond the legal limits of settlement. The Swan River Settlement, on the far western side of the continent, had been founded in 1829 and centered on Perth and its port at Fremantle. By placing the western colony as an inset, Teesdale gave London readers a view of both ends of the British presence in Australia. A further small map shows the entire continent.

A descendant of a convict transported to New South Wales or of an early settler on the Swan River, a collector of Teesdale's atlases, or a student of colonial Australia would find a pointed gift here. TheMapVault's 1831 Teesdale and Dower map of Van Diemen's Land is the Tasmanian companion, and the later Tallis sheets of 1851 give New South Wales and Western Australia a full page each; this 1834 edition is the earlier plain engraved version that puts the two mainland colonies into a single sheet. 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.