New South Wales Map 1851 Illustrated Atlas Print - Sydney, Newcastle, Wollongong, Albury

John Tallis, the London publisher who produced the decorative world atlas for the Great Exhibition of 1851, issued this map of New South Wales in London in 1851, engraved for R. Montgomery Martin's Illustrated Atlas. Tallis was one of the last of the great decorative mapmakers, and his maps are prized for the small scenes that crowd their margins. This is a full-color example, and its character comes from its vignettes of Sydney and the Murray, a study of the grass tree known as Xanthorrhoea, and a seal. It is a regional map of the colony, made in 1851, the year gold was found at Ophir in New South Wales and the Port Phillip District was separated from it to become Victoria.

Sydney, the colony's capital, was the oldest European settlement in Australia, founded in 1788 on Port Jackson. The Murray, which forms much of the southern boundary of the colony today, was the great inland river that overlanders followed into the pastoral districts. Xanthorrhoea, the grass tree, is a plant native only to Australia and a familiar sight in its bush. The Blue Mountains, crossed in 1813, opened the country beyond to sheep, while the Hunter Valley to the north supplied coal and wine. With the split from Victoria, New South Wales lost the southern part of its territory in the very year its gold was discovered in the west.

A Sydney family, a descendant of a convict or free settler from the 1850s, or a collector building a set of the Tallis Australian maps will find a lasting gift here. TheMapVault's 1876 Richards sheet records the same colony's gold fields and minerals in a more utilitarian style, and Teesdale's 1834 map of the colony shows it before the gold rush and before Victoria split away; this Tallis edition sits between them, a decorative, mid-century view. It is also the companion of Tallis's sheets of Victoria and of the whole continent, issued in the same year. 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.