Australia & Tasmania Map 1856 Physical Atlas Print - Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Hobart

Cornelius S. Cartee compiled A School Atlas of Physical Geography, published in Boston in 1856 by Hickling, Swan, and Brown to accompany his Elements of Physical Geography, and this map of Australia is page VII among its thirteen maps. The atlas was compiled from the celebrated atlas of A. Keith Johnston and from the work of Milner and Petermann, so it carries the authority of leading British and German physical geographers, and G.W. Boynton engraved this sheet. Most of the atlas is hand painted in full color, and this map has the soft washes and hachured relief that turn a classroom diagram into a handsome object; the atlas was bound in green cloth with Cartee's Physical Atlas stamped in gilt. It is a regional map of Australia in a school atlas of physical geography, made when Victoria's gold rush, begun in 1851, was still drawing emigrants to the colonies.

Sydney, Melbourne and Perth are marked as the principal colonial settlements, along with the regions into which the continent was then divided, including New South Wales, South Australia and Tasmania. Sydney, founded in 1788, was the oldest of the three; Melbourne dated only from 1835 yet was swelling on the Victorian gold rushes; and Perth, the Swan River Colony's town of 1829, remained a small, isolated settlement. Tasmania had dropped the name Van Diemen's Land only that year. The Great Australian Bight, the Coral Sea and the Tasman Sea mark the coast, and the sheet reaches north to parts of Southeast Asia and east to the western edge of New Zealand. Because the atlas is physical rather than political, relief and rivers do the work that boundaries do on a commercial map.

A geography teacher, a school alumnus, or a collector of nineteenth-century educational atlases would find a thoughtful gift here, and it suits a graduation or a retirement from the classroom. TheMapVault carries several later maps of the continent, among them Gray's 1878 Philadelphia sheet, Stanford's 1882 and 1926 atlas maps and Gill's 1928 pictorial; Cartee's 1856 sheet is the earliest of these, made as a teaching tool for pupils of physical geography rather than as a commercial or imperial reference, and drawn before Queensland became a separate colony in 1859. 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.