Australia & Tasmania Map 1879 Regional Print - Sydney, Melbourne, Darwin, Hobart

O.W. Gray of Philadelphia published this Gray's New Map of Australia in 1879, from the firm whose National Atlas was one of the most successful commercial ventures of the 1870s and one of the last to be hand-colored. Gray's was a Philadelphia publishing house that later traded as O.W. Gray and Son, and it issued atlases throughout the late nineteenth century. This sheet is a Victorian-era map of Australia with an inset of Tasmania, which was labeled Van Diemen's Land in the firm's previous edition. It is extremely detailed for an American atlas map, especially in the interior, and it is colored by territory; it is a regional map made in 1879, when the transcontinental telegraph already tied the continent together.

The map is dense with names. It lists towns, railroads, mountains, rivers, rocks, coral reefs, lakes and many elevations, and it names the districts of New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia and Western Australia. The transcontinental telegraph line extends north and south, and Darwin and Southport appear in the Northern Territory, both on the Overland Telegraph line. Farther down the line is the Alice Springs Telegraph Station. Cardwell was the most northerly settlement in Queensland, while neither Canberra nor Cairns appears at all. Ayers Rock, named by William Gosse in 1873, and Mount Olga, named by Ernest Giles in 1872, lie in the southernmost part of Alexandra Land, an interior name that referred to the Northwest Territory.

A traveler drawn to the Northern Territory or the outback, a collector of the Gray atlases, or an admirer of Uluru will find a particular gift here, whether for a birthday or a trip. TheMapVault carries Gray's 1878 sheet, which traces exploration routes across the interior, while this 1879 version names Alexandra Land, the telegraph stations and the rocks at the continent's center. Rand McNally's 1882 map and Cram's 1889 map are also American, but the Gray sheet is the one with the most interior detail. 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.