Sydney Harbour Map 1913 Bird's-Eye View - Darling Harbour, Pyrmont, Balmain

William Hardy Wilson, a Sydney-based architect and artist later regarded as one of the great masters of Australian architecture, drew this chromolithograph in 1913 for the Sydney Harbour Trust, the three-commissioner body created in 1900 to replace the private, piecemeal control of the city's wharves. The Trust was known for turning a haphazard waterfront into a planned port, and the view was prepared to illustrate that work under the title Birds Eye View of General Wharfage Scheme West of Dawes Point as it will appear when completed. It is a large, high-vantage image looking south from above Goat Island, with cargo ships crowded through the harbor basins and proposed subaqueous tunnels drawn in. Issued as reconstruction neared completion, it shows Sydney in 1913 becoming Australia's largest modern urban port, its capacity raised from 49,000 to over 200,000 tons.

Dawes Point, Barangaroo and the central business district run down the left side of the view. Dawes Point is the headland where the southern end of the Sydney Harbour Bridge would rise from the 1920s. Pyrmont fills the center, a peninsula pressed between Darling Harbour and Blackwattle Bay, among the wharf basins that also include Rozelle Bay, White Bay and Johnstons Bay. Balmain, on the right, is the working-waterfront suburb on the opposite shore of Darling Harbour, long associated with shipbuilding. Goat Island, beneath the viewpoint, had served as a powder magazine. Taken together, the districts show a harbor in the middle of being rebuilt as a single working system, with rail lines, new wharves and modern thoroughfares replacing the old warren of lanes.

A Sydney family, someone moving to Pyrmont or Balmain, a retired wharf worker, or a collector of maritime and port history will find an unusual gift here, since the image is a planner's vision of the waterfront rather than a conventional street plan. Our other Australian listings are continental or state maps, such as the 1876 New South Wales gold fields sheet, so this one stands apart as a single harbor seen from the air at the moment of rebuilding. 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.