Australia & Tasmania Map 1878 Regional Print - Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, Hobart

Frank A. Gray drew this map of Australia, copyrighted in 1878 by O.W. Gray & Son of Philadelphia, and it appears in The National Atlas, the special edition published in 1884 by Stedman & Brown with 74 maps and engraving credited to W. H. Holmes. The Grays were known for their American atlases, and this National Atlas draws on the same map set as their Atlas of the United States and Continental Atlas, with many maps enlarged to double page and more city maps added. The Australia sheet is a hand-painted engraving in full color with an inset of Tasmania in the upper left and exploration routes traced across the interior, which gives an American atlas a detailed picture of a distant continent. It is a regional map of Australia and Tasmania, drawn when the continent was divided into six separate British colonies.

Western Australia, South Australia, New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland divide the mainland on this sheet, with Tasmania set apart in its own inset. The exploration routes marked across the interior belong to an era of overland expeditions, of which John McDouall Stuart's south-to-north crossing of 1862 and the Burke and Wills expedition of 1860 and 1861 are the best known, and in 1878 much of the center was still unknown to Europeans. The Murray River forms the border between New South Wales and Victoria, and Victoria's gold rushes of the 1850s had made its capital Melbourne a boom city. The Overland Telegraph, finished in 1872, had by then tied Adelaide to the northern coast and to the world's cable network, and the sheet draws rivers and mountain ranges throughout.

A family tracing ancestors who sailed for the Victorian goldfields or the farms of South Australia, an American collector of the Gray atlases, or a student of nineteenth-century exploration will find a ready gift in this sheet. TheMapVault also carries Kiepert's 1889 Australia and New Zealand drawn in Berlin, Stanford's 1882 Australia and Tasmania from London and Cartee's 1856 school map; Gray's 1878 version is the Philadelphia view, hand-painted in full color, with its Tasmania inset and traced exploration routes. 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.