Australia Map 1967 Atlas Print - Canberra, Sydney, Melbourne, Perth

This map of Australia comes from the Pergamon World Atlas, the English edition of the Polish Atlas Swiata that Pergamon Press of Oxford issued in 1968 with the Polish Scientific Publishers of Warsaw, and it was compiled by the Polish Army Topography Service in 1967. The atlas was known for being enormous, nearly 5.5 kilograms of paper with over 400 thematic maps, and for its restrained tinted colors, which this sheet uses to separate mountains, deserts and ocean depths, with blue shading for the seas around the coast. It was printed by Wojskowe Zaklady Kartograficzne in Warsaw on beige paper as a double-page spread at 1:10,000,000 and carries an inset of Canberra. As a political and physical map of the whole continent, it records an Australia in 1967 that was a Commonwealth nation with decimal currency, introduced only the year before.

The Great Dividing Range, the Nullarbor Plain and the Simpson Desert are the landmarks the sheet names, and each has its own story. The Great Dividing Range runs down the east coast, separating the wetter coastal strip from the dry interior and feeding river systems such as the Murray and the Darling. The Nullarbor Plain, whose name means no trees, is a vast limestone expanse along the Great Australian Bight, crossed by the Trans-Australian Railway completed in 1917. The Simpson Desert holds the world's largest field of parallel sand dunes, in the arid heart of the continent. Canberra, shown in an inset, was a planned city: its design came from the American architect Walter Burley Griffin in 1912, and Parliament moved there in 1927.

A diplomat or public servant leaving a posting at Canberra, a friend who has crossed the Nullarbor by road, or a family with roots anywhere on the continent would value this as a gift for a farewell or a milestone birthday. TheMapVault's other Pergamon sheet looks only at the southeast at 1:5,000,000; this one steps back to show the whole continent at half that scale, with the national capital inset. It is also the mid-century counterpart to Stanford's 1926 and Cram's 1925 atlas sheets, which were drawn before Parliament moved to Canberra. 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.