Australia Map 1926 Air Routes Print - Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth

The Air Ministry, working with the War Office and the Ordnance Survey, produced this map of Australia showing existing and proposed air routes, published in London in 1926 by His Majesty's Stationery Office. It appeared in The Approach Towards a System of Imperial Air Communications, a government report carrying 25 maps, 13 views and 3 diagrams that is now regarded as a pivotal early document in the development of international air travel. The sheet is a colored lithograph on a fold-out leaf, with relief in hachures and the plain, functional clarity of a planning office rather than any decorative flourish. It covers the Australian continent as a single air-route map, drawn when Australia was a self-governing dominion of the British Empire and commercial aircraft could fly no more than about 400 miles at a stretch.

Sydney and Melbourne, the two largest cities of the southeast, anchor the populous coast, while Perth lies far to the west, cut off from them by the Great Australian Bight and the desert behind it. The Transcontinental Railway had linked that western side of the continent to the east since 1917, and aircraft were now expected to shorten the journey further. Darwin, on the northern coast, was Australia's gateway toward Asia and the end of the first England-to-Australia flight in 1919. The Gulf of Carpentaria and the Coral Sea mark the northern and eastern coasts, giving any route a long overwater stage. With aircraft of such limited range, the planners had to think in terms of a thin chain of landing grounds, so the map reads less as geography than as a plan for connecting a continent.

Pilots, aviation historians, airline staff and anyone who has made the long journey between Britain and Australia will recognize something personal in a sheet that records how that journey was first imagined, and it suits a retirement or farewell gift for someone leaving a flying career. TheMapVault also lists Stanford's Australia and Tasmania from the same year, but that is a general atlas sheet of states, towns and railways; this edition is a government planning document, concerned with routes rather than territory. 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.