Australia Map 1889 Atlas Print - Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Perth

George F. Cram of Chicago issued this map of Australia in 1889, a very detailed sheet that shows population and other data of interest. Cram, born in 1842, had served under General Sherman on the March to the Sea, and in 1867 he and his uncle Rufus Blanchard founded the company in Evanston, Illinois; two years later he became its sole owner. His firm specialized in atlases, and its most famous product, the Unrivaled Atlas of the World, stayed in print from the 1880s to the 1950s. The sheet, which stresses data over decoration, is a regional map of the whole continent, made in 1889 when Australia was still six British colonies and Victoria's land boom, centered on Melbourne, was at its height.

Melbourne, the capital of Victoria, was in the last flush of that boom in 1889 and was then the largest city on the continent, ahead of Sydney, the capital of New South Wales and its oldest settlement. Brisbane was the capital of Queensland, which had split from New South Wales in 1859, and Perth, on the Swan River, was the small capital of the vast and thinly peopled Western Australia. Adelaide, in South Australia, administered the Northern Territory from afar. The Great Australian Bight cuts into the southern coast, and the Gulf of Carpentaria into the north. The sheet stresses numbers over scenery, which makes it a record of how few people lived in so large a country.

Descendants of emigrants who sailed from Britain in the 1880s, an American collector of Cram atlases, or a family with a link to Australia and Chicago will find a fitting gift here, perhaps for a reunion or an anniversary. TheMapVault's Cram sheet of 1925 shows the same continent after Federation and the move of Parliament to Canberra, with an alphanumeric grid and a Tasmania inset; this 1889 edition is the colonial-era version, emphasizing population and data. Rand McNally's 1882 Chicago map is the other American view of the colonies, with its three insets. 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.