Great Southern Land: the Maritime Exploration of Terra Australis
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GREAT SOUTHERN The Maritime Exploration of Terra Australis LAND Michael Pearson the australian government department of the environment and heritage, 2005 On the cover photo: Port Campbell, Vic. map: detail, Chart of Tasman’s photograph by John Baker discoveries in Tasmania. Department of the Environment From ‘Original Chart of the and Heritage Discovery of Tasmania’ by Isaac Gilsemans, Plate 97, volume 4, The anchors are from the from ‘Monumenta cartographica: Reproductions of unique and wreck of the ‘Marie Gabrielle’, rare maps, plans and views in a French built three-masted the actual size of the originals: barque of 250 tons built in accompanied by cartographical Nantes in 1864. She was monographs edited by Frederick driven ashore during a Casper Wieder, published y gale, on Wreck Beach near Martinus Nijhoff, the Hague, Moonlight Head on the 1925-1933. Victorian Coast at 1.00 am on National Library of Australia the morning of 25 November 1869, while carrying a cargo of tea from Foochow in China to Melbourne. © Commonwealth of Australia 2005 This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced by any process without prior written permission from the Commonwealth, available from the Department of the Environment and Heritage. Requests and inquiries concerning reproduction and rights should be addressed to: Assistant Secretary Heritage Assessment Branch Department of the Environment and Heritage GPO Box 787 Canberra ACT 2601 The views and opinions expressed in this publication are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Australian Government or the Minister for the Environment and Heritage. While reasonable efforts have been made to ensure that the contents of this publication are factually correct, the Commonwealth does not accept responsibility for the accuracy or completeness of the contents, and shall not be liable for any loss or damage that may be occasioned directly or indirectly through the use of, or reliance on, the contents of this publication. Department of the Environment and Heritage Cataloguing-in-Publication Pearson, Michael, 1951- Great Southern Land : the maritime exploration of Terra Australis / Michael Pearson. P. CM. BIBLIOgraphY ISBN 0642551855 1.Australia-Discovery and exploration. 2. Voyages and travel. 3. Navigation-Australia-History. I. Australia. Dept. of the Environment and Heritage. 919.4’04-ddc22 994-ddc22 Designed by arda www.arda.net.au Edited by Margaret Cresswell Printed by National Capital Printing, Canberra CONTENTS foreword iv introduction 1 the history of cartography and navigation 5 the portuguese debate: the dieppe maps 15 ‘terra australis incognita’ becomes ‘new holland’: 1606-1767 29 where is the east coast? the british and the french 53 new holland becomes australia 83 filling in the gaps and improving the details 105 discovering and charting australian antarctic territory, heard island and macquarie island 121 the great southern land revealed 127 endnotes 131 bibliography 138 glossary 145 index 148 iii FOR EWORD Although Indigenous Australians had lived From that point on, for more than here for thousands of years, for the Europeans 250 years, Dutch, French and English it was ‘Terra Australis Incognita’, the great navigators continued to discover, chart unknown land. Early maps of the world and expand the world’s understanding of showed a single land mass at the bottom of the Australian coastline. The legacy of the world to balance, as one would with a these intrepid explorers remains with us set of scales, the land masses of the northern today, through place names such as van hemisphere. Diemen, d’Entrecasteaux, Cook, La Perouse, Freycinet and Bougainville, reminding us of Surrounded by an ocean barrier, the voyage this great age of exploration, adventure and from Europe to the world’s only island the race to find new worlds. continent was long and often perilous. By the 16th century, however, European Great Southern Land: The maritime navigators were risking their lives and their exploration of Terra Australis was originally ships to find new maritime routes to the written to provide a context for the Australian spices and silks of Asia. At the beginning Heritage Council’s assessment of coastal of the 17th century Dutch explorers began heritage sites. It is published as part of the to uncover the secrets of the Australian Australian Government’s celebration of the continent. Willem Jansz and his crew of 400th anniversary of Willem Jansz’s historic the Duyfken made history in 1606 by being journey in the Duyfken. It is an absorbing the first recorded Europeans to set foot on story of an exciting period of discovery, and I Australian soil at the Pennefather River on encourage everyone to take a journey back in Cape York Peninsula. Ten years later, Dirk time, and through this book experience the Hartog discovered and mapped a stretch of exploration of our nation. the Western Australian coast. By 1618 the first accurate depictions of the coast of the Great Southern Land began appearing on European maps. Senator the Hon. Ian Campbell Minister for the Environment and Heritage iv INTRODUCTION he central theme of Great Southern Land: The maritime exploration of Terra Australis is the definition and understanding of Australia as a continent through the exploration, study and charting of its coasts. In this study Tthe theme is sometimes summarised as ‘mapping the coastline’. The story includes the separation of an Australian continent from the ill-defined ‘Terra Australis Incognita’, the slow unfolding of the geography of the continental edge, and the conceptual change from ‘the Great Southland’ to ‘Australia’. It also covers the addition to European science of the new genera and species of plants and animals found during coastal scientific survey, which so defined the strangeness of the place in the popular mind; and the process of European settlement and making the coast safe for the vessels carrying out trade between the new settlements and the rest of the world. In more recent times the pursuit of knowledge has expanded outwards to the edges of the continental shelf, for purposes of resource conservation and exploitation, and national control of them. For the purposes of this study, the information gathered by explorers and surveyors had to be made more widely known and accessible to have had a real influence on the definition and understanding of the continent. Knowledge was of no use unless it was shared and fed into a broader understanding of geography or science. ‘Mapping’ was an act that transferred observed fact to documented record, be it chart or text, and it was a pointless and ineffectual act if others could not access and use the record. In terms of their traditional cosmology, Aboriginal people believe that they have always been here, so to them the idea of ‘discovery’ is meaningless. The more generally held interpretation is that the ‘discovery’ of Australia occurred tens of thousands of years ago, when Aboriginal people crossed the then narrower straits from Asia and spread southwards to eventually occupy most parts of the continent.1 So in this study, if the term ‘discovery’ is used at all, it is in the context of the discovery of geographical or scientific facts for European science and commerce, not in the sense of the discovery of previously unknown land (though ‘discovery’ is appropriate for Antarctica and many distant islands). Great Southern Land: the Maritime Exploration of Terra Australis 1 The Indigenous settlement of Australia and the Torres Strait Islands resulted in detailed knowledge of the geography, plant and animal species on a regional basis within Indigenous communities. However, it is unlikely that this knowledge was conceived of on a continental basis, and it was not transmitted in a form that was readily accessible to Europeans when they arrived. So, except in those cases where Aboriginal people or Torres Strait Islanders informed European explorers, scientists or surveyors about the environment being studied by them, direct Indigenous input into the maritime investigation of the Australian coastline in the context of this study is very limited. Undoubtly the individual Aboriginals taken on exploration and survey voyages obtained a broader view of Aboriginal people in other regions, and would have conveyed that broader view to their own people on their return, but the expansion of this theme is beyond the scope of this essay. However, the growth and ‘mapping’ of European knowledge of the extent of Indigenous occupation of the continent, of Indigenous lifestyle and resources, and the nature and events of contact between the surveyors and Indigenous people, are all very much part of the story. The charting and investigation of the geography of the coast is only one, albeit important, aspect of the story of conceiving Australia as a continental entity. In addition to the cartographic and scientific understanding of Australia as a continent, there was also an evolving vision of Australia as a political entity—first as a series of colonies and settlements, then as a unified nation. Similarly there was an evolving commercial perception of Australia—initially as the residual Great South Land that might have wealth worth exploiting, then as a series of British colonies with sea-links between them, and finally as a nation with responsibility for defining and maintaining sea-lanes for growing international and domestic commercial traffic. Frank Broeze’s proposition that the European settlements around the Australian coast should be seen as ‘an archipelago of “islands” of settlement rather than as a continent’ is an important concept in focusing on the peculiarly maritime nature of the nation’s early history.2 As Campbell Macknight has clearly demonstrated, the Australian coast can also be thought of in relation to its particular geographic and climatic characteristics, and its particular history of ‘outside’ contact.3 Macknight’s coastal regions, which seem appropriate in the context of the present study, are:- 1.