Northeast Australia Map 1958 Atlas Print - Brisbane, Gold Coast, Townsville, Cairns

This map of north-eastern Australia was edited by John Bartholomew, the Edinburgh cartographer who held a royal appointment under George V, for The Times Atlas of the World, Mid-Century Edition, which Houghton Mifflin of Boston and John Bartholomew and Son of London published in 1958. The atlas filled five volumes between 1955 and 1959 with 122 colored double-page sheets and a gazetteer of more than 200,000 names, and the printing was done by William Clowes and Son. This sheet has the restrained, exact look of mid-century reference mapping, with relief in gradient tints and spot heights in feet, sea depths in shading and soundings in meters, and an inset of Brisbane at 1:250,000. It is page 13 of volume one, a regional map of Queensland and part of the Northern Territory, drawn when Queensland's sugar, cattle and mining industries were prospering in the post-war years.

Brisbane gets the sheet's only inset, which suits a city that began as a convict settlement on its river in the 1820s and had become Queensland's capital when the colony separated from New South Wales in 1859. The Gulf of Carpentaria cuts into the northern coast, the shallow gulf whose tidal marshes the Burke and Wills expedition reached in 1861. Along the eastern edge the Coral Sea washes a coast fringed by the Great Barrier Reef, and the sea gave its name to the naval battle of 1942 that turned back a Japanese advance toward Australia. Inland, the Great Dividing Range separates the green coastal strip from the dry plains of the west, which is why the sheet's railways and roads cling to the coast. The map is a clear record of a state built along its shoreline.

A Queenslander with roots in Brisbane, a veteran who passed through the city when it served as a Pacific headquarters in the Second World War, or a diver who has swum the Great Barrier Reef will find a fitting gift here, perhaps for a retirement or a farewell. TheMapVault carries Blackie's c. 1880 map of Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria, which shows the colonies as they were still being surveyed; this 1958 Times sheet is the modern atlas view, with the whole north-east on one page and Brisbane drawn at close scale. It pairs with the atlas's south-eastern and western sheets. 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.