New South Wales Map 1876 Gold Fields Print - Sydney, Newcastle, Wollongong

Thomas Richards, who rose from apprentice to Government Printer of New South Wales in Sydney, published this Sketch Map of New South Wales Showing the Localities of the Principal Minerals in 1876, and it is credited alongside the draftsman J. Tayler, whose 1871 map of New South Wales underlay most maps of the colony until the geological survey of 1880. Richards was a printing innovator who introduced photo-lithography to the Government Printing Office, and this sheet carries his office's clean, practical style, with relief shown by hachures and the mineral-bearing districts printed in color. It covers New South Wales within its post-Victoria boundaries, with an inset placing the colony on the Australian continent, and it is classed as a mineral-resources map. By 1876 mining control had passed from the Department of Lands to a new Department of Mines as company operations overtook the lone prospector.

Ophir, marked near Orange, is where Edward Hargraves found gold in 1851, the strike that began the first major Australian rush after California's 1848 discovery threatened to draw prospectors away from the colony. Railways run inland from Ports Hunter and Jackson, the harbors of Newcastle and Sydney, with proposed extensions drawn in ahead of the track, alongside roads and telegraph lines. The sheet also delineates the Pastoral Districts, the wool economy that kept the colony prosperous after the Port Phillip District broke away to become Victoria. Colored zones mark kerosene shale, coal, tin, iron, silver, copper, gold and diamonds, the result of some twenty years of prospecting. Only 'proclaimed' gold fields appear, since no claim was valid outside one.

Anyone with roots in Orange, Bathurst or the Hunter coalfields, a geologist or mining engineer, or a descendant of an 1850s digger will find a particular gift in this sheet, as will a collector of Australian gold-rush history. TheMapVault carries no other New South Wales map in this style; the 1873 edition of this map separated 'proclaimed' from 'unproclaimed' fields, whereas this 1876 version drops the unproclaimed ones, so it reads as an official mining statement rather than a prospector's guide. TheMapVault's 1913 Sydney Harbour view shows the same colony's port from above. 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.