Western Australia Map 1851 Illustrated Atlas Print - Perth, Bunbury, Geraldton, Albany

John Tallis, the London publisher whose Illustrated World Atlas was produced for the Great Exhibition of 1851, issued this map of Western Australia and the Swan River in London in 1851, engraved for R. Montgomery Martin's Illustrated Atlas. Tallis ranks among the last of the great decorative mapmakers, and his maps are prized for their vignettes of indigenous life and local scenes. This is a full-color example, and it extends from Champion Bay in the north to Doubtful Island Bay in the south, colored by counties, with vignettes of sheep shearing, Aborigines, Perth from Mount Eliza and three other scenes. It is a regional map of the Swan River Colony, made in 1851 when the colony had been settled for only two decades and had just begun to receive convicts, in 1850.

Perth, shown from Mount Eliza in its own vignette, was founded in 1829 by Captain James Stirling on the north bank of the Swan River, and Fremantle grew beside it as its port. Champion Bay, at the top of the sheet, marks the northern limit of settlement, and lead was being mined in that district in the 1840s. At the southern edge Doubtful Island Bay lies on the wild south coast, far from any town of consequence. The sheep-shearing scene is a reminder that wool, rather than gold, carried the colony, which had few settlers and needed convict labor to build its roads and public works.

A Western Australian family with settler ancestors from the 1830s, a lover of Perth's Swan River, or a collector building a set of the Tallis Australian maps will find a lasting gift in this sheet. TheMapVault's Teesdale map of 1834 carries the Swan River Settlement only as an inset on a map of New South Wales, and the 1958 Times Atlas sheet shows the state at modern scale; this 1851 Tallis edition is the one that gives the colony the entire page, with its vignettes of shearing and Perth from the hill. The same series includes Tallis's maps of Australia, New South Wales, Victoria and New Zealand. 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.