First published as plate 9 from King's 'Charts of the coast of Australia' (1824-1826), the current chart is a later issue, sold separately with many revisions. It charts Port Jackson from the Heads west to 'The Flats' (Homebush Bay), with an inset sketch of Parramatta River from Homebush to Parramatta. This map became the "basis for a series of Admiralty charts of Port Jackson, and was updated a further three times through to this example of 1856. There is a good sketch plan of the streets of Sydney, and the inset shows the continuation of the Parramatta River, as far as practicably navigable" (Brown).

The earliest chart, of Sydney Harbour was published in 1791, based on a survey carried out within a few weeks of first European settlement in January of 1788. The survey by Lieutenants John Hunter and William Bradley, which extended from the Harbour entrance to 'The Flats', now Homebush Bay, took only nine days to complete.

The second survey was completed by John Septimus Roe, the assistant surveyor to hydrographer Phillip Parker King from 1818 to 1822. King had been commissioned to survey the Australian coast based on the findings of Mathew Flinders in his circumnavigation. Although King and Roe conducted most of their survey in the western and north-western coast of Australia, they used Sydney as one of his bases. Roe surveyed Sydney Harbour himself, as far west as The Flats and beyond in 1822, but also borrowed from the discoveries of Hunter and Bradley, and also from Freycinet's survey of 1802.

The mapmakers
Phillip Parker King (1791-1856) was born on Norfolk Island, where his father, Philip Gidley King, was lieutenant-governor. Later his father would become the third governor of New South Wales. King fils entered the Royal Navy in 1807, some say under the patronage of Flinders, a family friend, and in 1817 he was commissioned to continue Flinders's survey of the coastline of Australia. In this way, he completed the work of Cook and Flinders, and is now regarded as "the greatest of the early Australian marine surveyors" and his charts "of a quality not attained by any previous navigator in the Pacific" (Ingleton). Later, in 1826 King famously sailed in command of H.M.S. 'Adventure', with H.M.S. 'Beagle' in company, to chart the coasts of Peru, Chile and Patagonia.

John Septimus Roe (1797-1878). In 1817 Roe was posted as master's mate to the surveying service in New South Wales under the command of Phillip Parker King. In his letters Roe referred to his task "as the completion of the work done by Matthew Flinders, the interruption of whose exploring, Roe wrote, 'had left in much, and indeed almost total geographical uncertainty, the whole of the western, north-western and northern coasts of Australia, comprised between Cape Leeuwin and the Gulf of Carpentaria, with much of the north-eastern coastline from Torres Strait to Breaksea Spit, a knowledge of the whole of which could not but prove highly beneficial both to a rising colony and its parent state'... He was recuperating from a severe illness when he was offered the post of surveyor-general at the new settlement to be established at Swan River. To enable him to accept the position the Admiralty gave him two years leave, later extended for over forty years. From the time he arrived in the transport Parmelia in June 1829 until his death, Roe was influential in the development of Western Australia" (Uren).