Queensland, New South Wales & Victoria Map 1880 Regional Print - Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Newcastle

Blackie and Son of Edinburgh and London produced this map of Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria around 1880, a vivid and intricate portrayal of the three colonies of the east coast. The Blackie firm was a major Scottish publisher of atlases and school books, and its maps were made for a wide readership at home and in the colonies. This sheet shows counties, rivers, mountains and islands, the outer boundary of the Great Barrier Reef, and the early roads of the period, whether open to traffic, under construction or approved by Parliament. It is a regional map of the eastern third of the continent, drawn when the three colonies were separate, self-governing places, and their population and wealth had been transformed by gold and wool.

Queensland, which separated from New South Wales in 1859, stretches along the north-east, and its coast is fringed by the outer edge of the Great Barrier Reef. Brisbane began as a penal settlement in the early nineteenth century, and the gold rushes of the 1860s and 1870s and the sugar industry, which relied on South Sea Islander labor often recruited under harsh conditions, built the colony. New South Wales, where the First Fleet landed in 1788, had Sydney as its oldest settlement and had its own gold rush in the 1850s. Victoria split away in 1851, and its capital Melbourne, swollen by gold, had become one of the largest and wealthiest cities in the world by the 1880s. The Murray and Darling rivers and the Great Dividing Range tie the three together.

A family tracing ancestors through Queensland, New South Wales or Victoria, a student of colonial expansion, or a collector of Scottish atlas houses will find a thoughtful gift here, perhaps for a milestone birthday. TheMapVault's Gray map of 1879 and Rand McNally's 1882 sheet show the whole continent, and Richards' 1876 map focuses on New South Wales gold; this Blackie sheet is the one that gives the three eastern colonies the entire page, with their roads, counties and reef. It is a British, rather than American, view. 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.