Maps are records that help people navigate and find their way or show where landmarks or specific sites are. They can also show plans of where things might be developed or built. Maps are an important part of telling the history of Australia.

Maps show us people's perspectives and how things were valued. For instance, William Dampier's map of his global voyages in 1679 to 1691 are fascinating. This is because they show us what the Europeans explored of the Southern Hemisphere at that time and their imaginings of what the rest of it looked like. Equally, a town planning map of Tennant Creek in the Northern Territory from 1972 gives us a snapshot of the areas in which a community was growing and developing.

About our Maps collection

Our Maps collection includes around 1 million maps, from early European charts to current mapping of Australia, in print and digital form. All online maps are now freely available for download, in high resolution.

You can find:

• 200,000 post-1900 Australian topographic maps published by national and state mapping authorities
• property and subdivision maps for each Australian state and territory - useful for family history research
• thematic maps of land use, water and other resource management, geology and mining, transport, roads, planning and infrastructure, military mapping
• 800,000 aerial photographs of Australia, Papua New Guinea and Antarctica
• overseas maps, emphasising regions near Australia
• street directories, atlases, gazetteers and reference material

Highlights

Norman B. Tindale's iconic map

Showing the distribution of Aboriginal tribes of Australia.

Terra Australis

The earliest Dutch charting of the land that became Australia.

The Martini Atlas

The first European atlas of China

British Admiralty charts of Australian waters, 1814-1861

The circumnavigation of Australia.

Plan of Queanbeyan, County of Murray

Plan of the town of Queanbeyan, showing the first Torrens Title purchases.

Real Estate Plans of New South Wales

Part of the immense J. A. Ferguson collection of property maps.

Walter Burley Griffin

Unravel the fledgling development of our nation's capital with maps illustrating Griffin's vision of Canberra.

First World War trench maps

Military maps of Gallipoli, Belgium and France, Egypt and Palestine.

By rail or road

An assortment of transport maps, 1850-1950.

Attack Pacific!

Japanese pictorial maps of Australia, Asia and the Pacific, 1940-45.

Australia 1:253,440

Detailed topographic maps prepared by Cartographic Section, Aust. Survey Corps, 1940-1960.