Victoria Map 1851 Illustrated Atlas Print - Melbourne, Geelong, Ballarat, Bendigo

John Tallis, the London map publisher who made the decorative world atlas for the Great Exhibition of 1851, issued this map of Victoria, or Port Phillip, in London in 1851, engraved for R. Montgomery Martin's Illustrated Atlas. Tallis was one of the last great decorative mapmakers, and his maps are admired for their vignettes of indigenous scenes and local life. This is a full-color example, centered on Port Phillip and colored to show county lines, and it carries insets of Port Phillip, Aborigines hunting, the Glenelg River and kangaroos. It is a regional map of the colony, drawn in 1851 when the Port Phillip District had just separated from New South Wales to become Victoria, and gold was about to be found within its borders.

The sheet extends from Follett and the Wimmera in the north-west to Twofold Bay and Cape Howe in the east, taking in the whole of the new colony. Cape Howe marked the border with New South Wales, and Twofold Bay, where Eden stands, was a whaling anchorage. The Glenelg River winds through the south-west before turning into South Australia, and the Wimmera is the dry wheat plain that now covers much of the north-west. Melbourne, founded in 1835 on the Yarra at the head of Port Phillip, was the colony's capital and the center of its wool trade. The gold discovered later that year at Clunes and Ballarat would swell its population many times over within a decade.

Descendants of gold-rush arrivals, a Melbourne family, or a collector of Tallis's decorative atlas maps will find a pointed gift here, and it suits a birthday or an anniversary. TheMapVault's 1851 Tallis sheets of Australia and of New South Wales cover the neighboring regions, and Colton's 1866 Australia lists Victoria's counties on an inset table; this Tallis map is the one dedicated to Victoria alone, drawn in the very year the colony was born. It gives Port Phillip and its hunting and river vignettes the full page. 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.