Australia & Tasmania Map 1925 Regional Print - Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide, Hobart

The George F. Cram Company of Chicago, an atlas house since 1867, included this map of Australia as page 159 of Cram's Unrivaled Atlas of the World, 1925 edition, a volume of 182 maps, 34 portraits and 14 photographic views, with maps of the World War and revised postwar boundaries. The atlas was meant to sit alongside Cram's Portable, Washable Map and Atlas Outfit, a set of ten wall maps in a metal briefcase, and it was built for classrooms and offices, with every map indexed and carrying population figures. This sheet is clear and orderly rather than ornate: it uses hachures for relief, an alphanumeric grid keyed to the index on pages 251 and 252, and an inset of Tasmania. It is a regional map of Australia in the 1920s, when the dominion, which had signed the Treaty of Versailles in its own right, was settling into peacetime.

Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide are among the cities the sheet marks, along with natural features including the Great Australian Bight and the Victoria Desert. Brisbane, on the river that bears its name, anchored Queensland's sugar and cattle coast, while Melbourne was still the seat of the federal government in 1925, since Parliament did not move to Canberra until 1927. Adelaide was a planned city laid out in 1836, and Perth, on the Swan River, lay roughly 2,000 miles from Sydney, joined to the east by the Trans-Australian Railway since 1917. The inset gives Tasmania, whose capital Hobart stands on the Derwent River, a closer look as a separate island state.

An American collector of Cram's atlases, a family with Australian relatives across the Pacific, or a Chicago traveler who has made the long trip south will find a distinctive gift here. TheMapVault also carries Stanford's 1926 Australia and Tasmania, drawn in London for British readers; Cram's 1925 sheet is the American counterpart, indexed to a grid with population figures and plainer in style than Stanford's cable-and-railway map. It also stands apart from the two Pergamon maps of 1967, which come from Warsaw and Oxford, one of them with an inset of Canberra as the national capital. 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.