Eastern New South Wales Map 1895 Regional Print - Sydney, Newcastle, Wollongong, Tamworth

John Bartholomew, whose Edinburgh firm was one of the leading British map publishers of the late nineteenth century, produced this map of the eastern section of New South Wales around 1895 in London and Edinburgh. The sheet is a detailed working map of the colony's populated half, with its towns, rivers, counties, districts and railways picked out. It shows the districts of New England, Liverpool Plains, Wellington, Monaro, Bligh and Gwydir, so it reads as a district-by-district survey of the pastoral and farming country east of the plains. It is a regional map made when New South Wales was a self-governing colony, six years before Federation, in the grip of a drought and a depression that had followed the boom of the 1880s.

The map records two railway openings that date it precisely. The line from Molong to Forbes had opened in 1893, joining the central-west to the main system. The Mungindi line ended at Narrabri, before its extension to Moree in 1897, which tells us the sheet was drawn between those two events. Liverpool Plains, with its black soil, was wheat and wool country, while New England in the north held cool tablelands and the sheep stations of the high country. Monaro, in the south, was a tableland of grazing country on the edge of the Snowy Mountains, and Gwydir took its name from the river that flows toward the plains. Together the districts mark the pastoral zones that the railways were pushing further inland.

A family with roots in the New England or Monaro districts, a rail historian, or a collector of colonial New South Wales would find a particular gift here, whether for a retirement or a reunion. TheMapVault's 1851 Tallis map of the colony is decorative and shows no railways, and the 1876 Richards sheet focuses on minerals and gold fields; this 1895 Bartholomew map is the railway-age view, with the lines, counties and districts of the eastern half given the whole page. It also postdates the Teesdale map of 1834 by sixty years of growth. 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.