In 1829 Governor Ralph Darling drew a line around the bit of New South Wales the Crown was prepared to sell. Government Order No. 50, published in the Sydney Gazette on 17 October 1829, named nineteen counties — Cumberland (proclaimed back in 1788) out to Gloucester on the Manning, St Vincent down to the Moruya, Wellington and Bligh inland. That was the Limits of Location: police, land sales, church reserves. Beyond it you were a squatter.
Surveyor-General Thomas Mitchell mapped the nineteen in 1834. Robertson’s land acts of 1861 made the fence redundant; New South Wales now has 141 counties, but the 1829 set is the one that still explains why the early maps stop. Don’t date the whole county idea to that year — Darling had already sketched the survey bounds in 1826, and Lord Bathurst had ordered the survey in 1825. Pair this sheet with the Maps of Sydney folder: this is the cadastral lid on the colony, not a pretty harbour chart.
