Australia Map 1928 Pictorial Print - Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth

Leslie MacDonald Gill, the London designer best known for his 1913 Wonderground map of the Underground, drew this pictorial map of Australia in 1928 for the Empire Marketing Board, and Dobson Molle Ltd of Edinburgh printed it as a large separate sheet rather than as part of any atlas. The Empire Marketing Board, set up in 1926, existed to persuade British shoppers to buy produce from the dominions, and this is one of the maps Gill made for it; the copy reproduced here comes from the Gill estate. The sheet is bright and busy, with waves running around the continent, a colorful striped border, a compass rose and the Australian coat of arms, and it is classed as a pictorial map of agriculture, fishing and mining. In 1928 Australia was a self-governing dominion of about six million people whose wool, wheat and meat found their biggest market in Britain.

The sheep, cattle and crops scattered across the continent stand for farming that was concentrated in a few well-known belts. Sheep and wheat dominated New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia, where the Murray River and its tributaries watered the southeastern interior, and wool was the country's leading export. Queensland added cattle stations and sugar cane along its tropical coast, Western Australia supplied gold alongside its own wheat belt, and Tasmania sent orchard fruit to British markets. The fishing boats and sea creatures along the coast mark an industry that was small beside farming and mining but was still counted among the dominion's products. Together the symbols turn a continent of nearly three million square miles into a shop window of what it had to sell.

Families from Australia's wool and wheat country, retired farmers, and collectors of interwar pictorial maps and posters will find a natural gift here, and it suits a milestone birthday for someone whose grandparents emigrated to work the land. TheMapVault also carries Stanford's 1926 Australia and Tasmania and the Air Ministry's 1926 air-routes sheet, both sober reference maps; Gill's 1928 sheet is the one made to sell the country, with production figures and a salesman's flair the others leave out. 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.