The Story Behind the Print: A Map of a Place That Doesn't Exist Anymore
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Some of my favourite pieces in the collection aren't prints of people or animals at all, they're maps. And one of my favourites is a map of a place you won't find on a modern atlas: Van Diemen's Land.
That was the name Tasmania carried for the first decades of European settlement, right up until 1856, when the colony renamed itself, partly to shake off the association with the island's grim convict history. So a map labelled "Van Diemen's Land" isn't just a map, it's a snapshot of an identity that no longer exists under that name.
What makes maps like this one so collectable isn't only the cartography, it's the decoration around it. Mid-19th century atlases, the kind this map comes from, treated the border of a map as its own artwork. Illustrators were brought in to fill the margins with vignettes, scenes of local life, landscape, industry, alongside the work of the cartographers actually plotting the coastline and towns. It's a strange and wonderful hybrid: part navigation tool, part gallery piece, made at a time when a map might be the only image a person back home ever saw of a place on the other side of the world.
Holding one now, coastline and vignettes both, you're holding two things at once: a record of how a place was actually mapped, and a record of how it was imagined and sold to people who'd never see it themselves.
That double life is exactly why maps like this hold up so well on a wall or in a collection. They're never just geography.
