Australia

Thursday, Oct 26, 2017

The land Australia: imagined, invented, recounted, mapped, colonised, explored, settled, and celebrated in our final major catalogue for the year. We invite you to discover over 200 years of rare printed, manuscript, cartographic and visual materials relating to the Southern Continent. From Herrera's account of Schouten & Le Maire's voyage in search of Terra Australis to Pelsaert's 1647 Batavia account with its astonishing first views (an unusually complete and correct copy of the very rare first edition); the collected edition of William Dampier's voyages in the Roebuck; through to the great classic accounts of Parkinson, Phillip, White, (with wonderful hand-coloured plates) Collins (in an unrecorded state with extra foldout engravings) and Tench. Souvenirs d'un Aveugle...the artist Jacques Arago's account of the Freycinet voyage is present with the lithographs beautifully hand-coloured.

We have included an important re-discovery - the Baldwin Manuscript (1835) - this substantial journal, never published in any form, provides a remarkable insight into life on board an India-bound vessel. Its author, Captain John Timmins Baldwin recounts a ship meeting mid-ocean (!) where he learns the fate of a friend Captain John Dickenson (convicted of embezzlement in Australia). Baldwin pens in this wake a long  comic poem which adds importantly to transportation literary narrative (#17). A more contemporary reflection on Transportation is to be seen in A View of the Hulks the earliest issue of this fascinating depiction with vibrant handcolouring. Quite the opposite to these early days, Henry Short's wonderful still life (#50) encapsulates abundance and prosperity in 1860s Melbourne. 

The catalogue may viewed as a flipbook here. This is a linked pdf, so please click on any text-page for more information and images or search at hordern.com

We have also featured a sumptuous publication Expedition of the the Australian Squadron to New Guinea admired as much for its technical virtuosity as its beauty. It is a piece of photo-reportage unmatched by any other work of this time and place. The photographs all date from the 1884 expedition of the Australian Squadron, when Commodore Erskine proclaimed a British protectorate over the south coast of New Guinea. Through the positioning of images of the official ceremonies alongside topographical views of the surrounding areas, the photographs themselves become a true part of the narrative: and perhaps the first photographic images of the meeting between Imperial forces and Hood Bay chiefs. Please click here to view.