Australia & Tasmania Map 1864 Regional Print - Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Hobart

Alvin Jewett Johnson of New York published this map of Australia in 1864 in Johnson's New Illustrated Family Atlas, the first issue of the atlas that Johnson put out with his partner Benjamin P. Ward. Johnson had begun as a teacher and book canvasser for the map publisher J.H. Colton and went on to build a firm whose early works were described as successors to Colton and Company. His maps carry a distinctive border, and the 1864 sheets use the fretwork pattern that ran from 1863 to 1869, which marks this edition as a product of those years. It is a regional map of Australia with an index of counties in New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, West Australia and Van Diemen's Land, drawn in 1864 when the Northern Territory had just been placed under South Australia.

No counties are shown in North Australia, since it was still almost uninhabited, and the map includes a list of discoveries. Interior exploration was limited, reaching only places such as Mount Wilson, Travelers Valley and Sturt's furthest. The county index for Victoria reflects the gold-rush colony's rapid settlement, and Melbourne was its capital, while Sydney remained the center of New South Wales. Van Diemen's Land, whose capital was Hobart, still used its old name, and Western Australia took convicts until 1868. The sheet is a snapshot of a continent mapped around its edge and empty at its heart.

A descendant of settlers in any of the colonies, an American collector of the Johnson atlases, or a student of Australian exploration would find a meaningful gift here. TheMapVault's 1866 Colton map of Australia was made by the firm Johnson started out succeeding, and it uses a plainer, more open design with two prime meridians; this 1864 Johnson sheet has the fretwork border and the county index that make it a different object. Gray's 1878 Philadelphia sheet is a later, more detailed American map of the same continent. 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.