Australia Map 1866 Regional Print - Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth

G. Woolworth Colton drew this map of Australia for Colton's General Atlas, published in 1866 by G.W. and C.B. Colton of 172 William Street, New York, as page 117 of an atlas of 119 sheets carrying 180 steel-engraved maps and plans. The atlas was known for its letterpress descriptions by Richard Swainson Fisher, and this 1866 edition differed from the 1865 printing in several places, especially in its western maps. The sheet is in full color to separate the political divisions, with relief in hachures, a decorative border, and two prime meridians, Greenwich and Washington, which reminds the reader that it was made for American eyes. It is a regional map of the whole continent at 1:14,000,000, drawn when Australia was still six separate British colonies, gold had made Victoria rich, and Queensland was only seven years old.

West Australia and South Australia are among the colonies the sheet picks out in color, and two inset tables list the counties of Victoria and New South Wales. Victoria's gold rushes of the 1850s had made Melbourne a boom city, while Sydney, in New South Wales, remained the oldest settlement on the continent. Adelaide, the capital of South Australia, was a planned city laid out in 1836, and its colony had taken over the administration of the Northern Territory in 1863. Western Australia, with its capital at Perth, was a convict colony from 1850 and still received transported prisoners in 1866. The Overland Telegraph that would link the south to the north was six years away, so the interior is largely blank.

A family with colonial ancestors in Victoria or South Australia, an American collector of the Colton atlases, or a student of nineteenth-century exploration would find a distinctive gift in this sheet, and it suits a family reunion or a move abroad. TheMapVault also carries Johnson's 1864 Australia, issued by a firm that began as Colton's successor, and Gray's 1878 Philadelphia sheet; Colton's 1866 version is the cleaner, more open New York view, with the county tables as its distinguishing feature. Stanford's 1882 sheet, by contrast, is a London steel engraving that adds the submarine cables. 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.