Atlas of Bundaleer Plains

ATLAS OF BUNDALEER PLAINS AND TATALA

Rothery, FM. Atlas of Bundaleer Plains and Tatala (introduction by N G Butlin and J N Jennings), Canberra: Business Archives, Australian National University in association with Australian National University Press, 1970

Frederick Montague Rothery, station manager, artist, poet, cartoonist and animal lover, deployed more than artistic talent, when between April 1877 and April 1878 he produced the Atlas of Bundaleer Plains and Tatala (pastoral properties in the Warrego district of southern Queensland and on the Culgoa River in northern New South Wales respectively). In 1955 the atlas was transferred to the Noel Butlin Archives Centre (then known as ANU Business Archives) with other records of the Squatting Investment Company. In 1970 two ANU scholars, N G Butlin and J N Jennings, recognised the atlas’s "wide and varied appeal as a picture of a huge pastoral holding...as a piece of cartography, as an appraisal of the geographical character of a substantial area of Australia, even as a sample of water-colour brushwork". The result of their interest was a colourful facsimile edition with a comprehensive historical introduction.

The book is currently out of print, but can be consulted in the reading room of the Noel Butlin Archives Centre.