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Stieler’s map of Australien captures the continent in the first years after Queensland’s separation from New South Wales (1859). Clear wash-color outlines distinguish the five colonies then recognized (West-Australien, Süd-Australien, Queensland, Neu-Süd-Wales, Victoria), while a finely engraved network of rivers, ranges, telegraph lines, and embryonic railways spreads over a still-sketchy interior.
A boxed key deciphers German abbreviations for bays, capes, channels, and other landforms; symbols locate towns, lighthouses, coral reefs, and salt lakes; and a neatly shaded inset details the topography of Sydney / Port Jackson. The map is further enriched by a chronological table of early explorers, charting the great age of Australian inland exploration that unfolded between 1840 and 1862.
The legend names every expedition whose route is plotted: Edward John Eyre (1840–41); Ludwig Leichhardt (1845); Charles Sturt (1845); the Gregory brothers with John Septimus Roe’s deputy H. T. Helpmann (1846); Edmund Kennedy (1847); Augustus Charles Gregory (1848); Kennedy again (1848); Surveyor-General Roe (1848–49); A. C. Gregory (1852); Robert Austin (1854); A. C. Gregory (1855–56); Francis Thomas Gregory (1858); John McDouall Stuart (1858); Benjamin Herschel Babbage (1858); Stuart (1860); William Lockyer Morton (1860); F. T. Gregory (1861); Stuart (1861); the Dempster brothers with Clarkson and Harper (1861); Robert O’Hara Burke and William John Wills (1860–61); Neilson (1861); Frederick Walker (1861); William Landsborough (1861–62); John McKinlay (1861–62); Landsborough again (1862); Alfred William Howitt (1862); and Stuart’s final south-to-north crossing of 1862.
Together these tracks and attributions transform the sheet from a mere colonial outline into a graphic digest of two dramatic decades of Australian discovery.
![A Chart of van Diemen's Land, the South Extremity of New Holland [on sheet with:] Continuation o fthe River from King George's Bay, on a larger Scale. with the Situation of the Ships Duke and Duchess, at Anchor.](https://storage.googleapis.com/raremaps/img/small/94750.jpg)