General Charte von Australien: Nach den neuesten Entdeckungs-Reisen und astronomischen Bestimungen neu entworfen und gezeichnet von I. C. M. Reinecke

Johann Matthias Christoph Reinecke was a German cartographer, geographer, and natural historian associated with the Weimar geographical publishing world. He produced maps for the Industrie-Comptoir in Weimar, one of the active German centres for geographical publication around 1800. His General Charte von Australien, revised in September 1803, reflects the rapid incorporation of new voyage information into European printed maps of Australia and the Pacific.

The map shows New Holland, Van Diemen’s Land, New Zealand, New Guinea, Southeast Asia, the Philippines, the western Pacific, and the island groups of the South Pacific. Australia is labelled Neu Holland vormals Ulimaroa, while eastern Australia is identified as Neu Süd Wallis oder Sydney-Cove. This combination of older and newer terminology reflects the transitional state of European geographical knowledge at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The map is especially significant for its treatment of Van Diemen’s Land. R. V. Tooley identified it as “the first German map to separate the Island of Tasmania from the continent of Australia, ” reflecting how quickly the results of George Bass and Matthew Flinders’s 1798–99 circumnavigation of Van Diemen’s Land entered European print. In this respect, Reinecke’s map belongs to the period when the outline of Australia was being rapidly revised.

The map also incorporates recent voyage information across the Pacific and the Australian region. Its German title announces that it was newly designed and drawn according to the latest voyages of discovery and astronomical determinations. It therefore presents Australia not as an isolated landmass, but as part of a wider Pacific and Southeast Asian geographical system.

Within the collection, this map is closely connected with Thomas Pennant’s Map for Mr Pennants Outline of the Globe (178), which records the “supposed newly discovered straits” before the separation of Van Diemen’s Land was fully fixed in print.