Southeast Australia Map 1958 Atlas Print - Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Hobart, Canberra

John Bartholomew, the Edinburgh cartographer who held a royal appointment under George V, edited this map of south-eastern Australia for The Times Atlas of the World, Mid-Century Edition, published in 1958 by Houghton Mifflin in Boston and John Bartholomew and Son in London. The atlas ran to five volumes between 1955 and 1959, with 122 colored double-page sheets and an index of more than 200,000 names, and its volumes were bound in red linen with a label stamped in real gold. This sheet shows the polish of the best mid-century reference mapping, with relief in gradient tints and spot heights in feet, ocean depth in shading and soundings in meters, and five inset maps at 1:250,000 that give Canberra, Adelaide, Melbourne, Hobart and Sydney their own close-ups. It is page 12 of volume one, a regional map of the south-east, drawn in 1958 when Australia was a Commonwealth realm in the middle of a post-war boom in immigration and industry.

The five insets belong to cities with very different origins. Sydney, founded in 1788 on Port Jackson, is the oldest, and Hobart, settled in 1804 on the Derwent River below Mount Wellington, is the second oldest. Melbourne dates from 1835 at the head of Port Phillip Bay and was swollen by the gold rushes of the 1850s, while Adelaide was laid out in 1836 as a planned city on the plain between the Mount Lofty Ranges and Gulf St Vincent. Canberra is the odd one out, a capital designed from scratch by the American architect Walter Burley Griffin in 1912, with Parliament moving there in 1927. Behind them the main map follows the Great Dividing Range and the rivers that run inland from it, so the sheet reads as a portrait of the corner of the continent where most Australians live.

Anyone with family in Sydney, Melbourne or Adelaide, a planner or civil engineer, or a collector of the great atlas sheets will find a pointed gift here, especially for someone leaving Australia after years in one of these cities. TheMapVault's 1967 Pergamon map of the south-east is a Polish-made view at the same 1:5,000,000 scale but gives only Adelaide an inset; this 1958 Times sheet is the British edition, with all five city close-ups. Its companions from the same atlas show the north-east and the west of the continent, and a further Times sheet reaches out to the Pacific islands. 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.