Sydney Map 1909 Pictorial Aeroplane Print - Sydney, North Sydney, Potts Point

H.E.C. Robinson of Sydney issued this chromolithograph aeroplane map of Sydney and Port Jackson around 1909, a rare early aviation piece that the Library of Congress catalogs as 1909. Herbert Edward Cooper Robinson, born in Winchester, England, in 1856 and raised in Geelong, learned draftsmanship at the New South Wales Lands Department before founding his own firm, and he moved his business to Phillip Street in 1906. The sheet follows the tradition of the monumental maps of Paris, London and Rome, in which important buildings are drawn in profile against a simple background, with an art nouveau border. It is a pictorial city map centered on Sydney Town Hall, drawn when the Wright brothers' flight of 1903 had made the airplane a worldwide fascination.

The map covers the area from Lavender Street in North Sydney to Victoria Park, and from Elizabeth Island to Potts Point. Its date can be narrowed by what it shows: wharves between Millers Point and Gasworks that were under construction in 1909 and 1910, while the Finger Wharf, completed in 1915, does not appear. The airplane drawn on it can only be the Wright model flown by Colin Defries, who made the first powered flight in Australia in December 1909, covering about 100 yards. Qantas, the country's first commercial airline, followed only eleven years later, in 1920. The map was designed to guide tourists to the sights without the clutter of an ordinary street map.

A Sydney family, an aviation historian, or a collector of pictorial city maps will find a delightful gift here, perhaps for a milestone birthday or a retirement. This is a very rare map, with only one other example known, at the Library of Congress. TheMapVault's 1913 Sydney Harbour view and the Sydney Harbour Trust's 1919 bird's-eye view cover the water and the port, while Robinson's 1909 sheet is the one that stands the city's buildings up in profile. 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.