Plan of Sydney with Pyrmont, New South Wales

This plan of Sydney with Pyrmont, New South Wales was published with the 1837 Report from the Select Committee on Transportation. Although issued in the parliamentary report, the plan itself is dated 1836 and shows Sydney together with Pyrmont, described in the title as the property of Edward Macarthur and divided into allotments for building.

The Report from the Select Committee of the House of Commons on Transportation was issued by the House of Commons in July 1837, together with minutes of evidence, appendices, and an index. Chaired by William Molesworth, the committee investigated the system of convict transportation to the Australian colonies, especially New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land. The report became a major document in debates over British penal policy, colonial labour, punishment, and the future of transportation. The report is significant for the history of Australia because it records British official inquiry into the operation and consequences of transportation at a moment when the system was under increasing scrutiny. Evidence taken before the committee addressed punishment, labour, colonial settlement, governance, morality, and the practical effects of transportation on both Britain and the Australian colonies.

This copy is especially relevant to the collection because it is associated with the Plan of Sydney with Pyrmont, New South Wales (174). The plan situates the colonial town within the wider harbour landscape and shows Sydney’s urban grid, public buildings, streets, wharves, reserves, and developing suburbs. Together, the report and plan connect parliamentary policy with the physical form of the colonial settlement.

Within the collection, this plan is closely connected with the related Report from the Select Committee on Transportation (436), John Septimus Roe’s A Survey of Port Jackson, New South Wales (175and 442), and Charles Grimes’s earlier settlement plan (165).