A Gazetteer of the Australian Colonies

A Geographical Dictionary; or Gazetteer of the Australian Colonies was compiled by William Henry Wells, surveyor, and publis...

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A Geographical Dictionary; or Gazetteer of the Australian Colonies was compiled by William Henry Wells, surveyor, and published in Sydney in 1848 by W. & F. Ford, George Street. Issued at a formative moment in Australia’s colonial development, the work was intended to address the lack of reliable geographical information available in Britain and to provide a systematic reference for settlers, administrators, and investors. The Gazetteer combines descriptive geographical text with engraved county maps, including some of the earliest published county maps of Australia, documenting settlement, land division, and colonial administration while large areas were still part of New South Wales. Notably, some of the maps predate the creation of the Colony of Victoria in 1851. As both a reference work and a vehicle for early colonial cartography, Wells’s Gazetteer is an important and scarce record of mid-19th-century Australian geographical knowledge and expansion.

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A Geographical Dictionary; or Gazetteer of the Australian Colonies was compiled by William Henry Wells, surveyor, and published in Sydney in 1848 by W. & F. Ford, George Street. Issued at a formative moment in Australia’s colonial development, the work was intended to address the lack of reliable geographical information available in Britain and to provide a systematic reference for settlers, administrators, and investors. The Gazetteer combines descriptive geographical text with engraved county maps, including some of the earliest published county maps of Australia, documenting settlement, land division, and colonial administration while large areas were still part of New South Wales. Notably, some of the maps predate the creation of the Colony of Victoria in 1851. As both a reference work and a vehicle for early colonial cartography, Wells’s Gazetteer is an important and scarce record of mid-19th-century Australian geographical knowledge and expansion.

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