Western Australia Map 1958 Atlas Print - Perth, Mandurah, Bunbury, Geraldton

John Bartholomew, the Edinburgh cartographer who held a royal appointment under George V, edited this map of Western Australia for The Times Atlas of the World, Mid-Century Edition, issued in 1958 by Houghton Mifflin in Boston and John Bartholomew and Son in London. The atlas was published in five volumes between 1955 and 1959, with 122 colored double-page sheets and a comprehensive index, and William Clowes and Son printed it. This sheet is drawn in portrait format, which suits a state that is far taller than it is wide, and it uses gradient tints and spot heights in feet for relief, shading and soundings in meters for the sea, and an inset of Perth and its environs at 1:250,000. It is page 14 of volume one, a regional map made in 1958, on the eve of the iron-ore boom that would transform the state's economy.

Perth sits on the Swan River, where the Swan River Colony was founded in 1829, and its inset shows the city and the port that serves it at close scale. The map marks the Great Victoria Desert in the south-east and the Great Sandy Desert in the north, two of the great arid belts that make most of the state nearly empty. It also records the Indian Ocean coastline, major roads and railways, rivers, mountain ranges and the boundaries with neighboring territories. Western Australia covers about a third of the continent, and the Trans-Australian Railway had joined its goldfields to the east since 1917. The sheet shows how a few settled corners and a thin line of tracks were laid across an enormous, thinly peopled space.

A Perth family with relatives on the east coast, a geologist or mining engineer, or a traveler who has crossed the Nullarbor by train will find a fitting gift here, particularly for someone leaving the state. TheMapVault's Tallis map of Western Australia and the Swan River, from 1851, shows the colony in its infancy with pictorial vignettes of sheep shearing and Perth from Mount Eliza, and Teesdale's 1834 sheet carries the Swan River Settlement as an inset; this 1958 Times map is the modern reference view, with desert, railway and city drawn at atlas accuracy. It is the western companion to the atlas's south-east and north-east sheets. 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.