Australia Map 1851 Illustrated Atlas Print - Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide

John Tallis, the London map publisher who gave the Great Exhibition of 1851 its decorative world atlas, issued this map of Australia in London in 1851, engraved for R. Montgomery Martin's Illustrated Atlas. Tallis was one of the last of the great decorative mapmakers, and the engraving of John Rapkin lent his atlases a fine, ornamental line. This is a full-color example, and its character comes from the vignettes: parrots, kangaroos, two sets of Aborigines, and a view of Sydney, together with two tables of the counties of Victoria and New South Wales. It is a regional map of the continent, made in 1851, the year Edward Hargraves found gold in New South Wales and Victoria separated from it as a colony of its own.

Sydney, the oldest European settlement in Australia, appears in its own vignette, which is fitting for the capital of the colony from which the others were carved. The tables of counties record how New South Wales and the new colony of Victoria were being divided into administrative districts as settlement spread. Western Australia and South Australia, the latter with its capital at Adelaide, share the sheet, as does Van Diemen's Land, the island that would soon become Tasmania. Port Phillip, where Melbourne had been founded in 1835, was drawing thousands of newcomers as the gold rushes began. The sheet reads as a continent on the point of rapid change.

A family with ancestors who arrived in the gold years, a collector building a run of the Tallis decorative atlas, or an Australian abroad would find a charming gift in this sheet. TheMapVault's Colton map of 1866 shows the same continent fifteen years later with a plainer, more official look, while Tallis's own sheets of New South Wales, Victoria, Western Australia and Tasmania each zoom in on one colony. This 1851 Tallis map is the one that puts the whole continent on a single page, with the birds, kangaroos and Sydney view that mark it out as decorative rather than administrative. 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.