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AUSTRALIA
AUSTRALIA or New Holland, the largest island-continent of Australasia, is situated within 10° 47′ and 39° 11′ S. lat., and 113° and 153° 30′ E. long. It measures 2500 miles in length from west to east, by 1950 miles in breadth from north to south, and contains an area of about 3,000,000 square miles—nearly the same as that of the United States of America, exclusive of Alaska. It is surrounded on the west by the Indian Ocean, and on the east by the South Pacific.
Sketch Map of Australia.
In the north it is separated from New Guinea by Torres Strait, which is 80 miles broad, and from the Eastern Archipelago by Arafura Sea ; while on the south Bass Strait, 140 miles wide, separates it from Tasmania. The neighbouring colony of New Zealand lies 1200 miles opposite its south-east coast.
Owing to its position at the antipodes of the civilised world, Australia has been longer a terra incognita than any other region of the same extent. Its first discovery is involved in considerable doubt, from confusion of the names which were applied by the earlier navigators and geographers to the Australasian coasts.
The ancients were somehow impressed with the idea of a Terra Australis which was one day to be revealed. The Phœnician mariners had pushed through the outlet of the Red Sea to eastern Africa, the Persian Gulf, and the coasts of India and Sumatra. But the geographer Ptolemy, in the 2d century, still conceived the Indian Ocean to be an inland sea, bounded on the south by an unknown land, which connected the Chersonesus Aurea (Malay Peninsula) with the promontory of Prasum in eastern Africa. This erroneous notion prevailed in mediaeval Europe, although some travellers like Marco Polo heard rumours in China of large insular countries to the south-east.
The investigations of Mr R. H. Major make it appear probable that the Australian mainland was known as “Great Java” to the Portuguese early in the 16th century; and the following passage in the Descriptionis Ptolemaicæ Augmentum of Cornelius Wytfliet, printed at Louvain in 1598, is perhaps the first distinct account that occurs of the country :—“ The Australis Terra is the most southern of all lands, and is separated from New Guinea by a narrow strait. Its shores are hitherto but little known, since, after one voyage and another, that route has been deserted, and seldom is the country visited, unless when sailors are driven there by storms. The Australis Terra begins at one or two degrees from the equator, and is ascertained by some to be of so great an extent, that if it were thoroughly explored it would be regarded as a fifth part of the world.”}} {{ti|1em|It was in 1606 that Torres, with a ship commissioned by the Spanish Government of Peru, parted from his companion Quiros (after their discovery of Espiritu Santo and the New Hebrides), and sailed from east to west through the strait which bears his name ; while in the same year the peninsula of Cape York was touched at by a vessel called the “ Duyfhen” or “ Dove” from the Dutch colony of Bantam in Java, but this was understood at the time to form a part of the neighbouring island of New Guinea. The Dutch continued their attempts to explore the unknown land, sending out in 1616 the ship “ Endraght,” commanded by Dirk Hartog, which sailed along the west coast of Australia from lat. 26° 30′ to 23° S. This expedition left on an islet near Shark's Bay a record of its visit engraved on a tin plate, which was found there in 1801. The “ Pera” and “ Arnhem,” Dutch vessels from Amboyna, in 1618 explored the Gulf of Carpentaria, giving to its westward peninsula, on the side opposite to Cape York, the name of Arnhem Land. The name of Carpentaria was also bestowed on this vast gulf in compliment to Peter Carpenter, then governor of the Dutch East India Company. In 1627 the “ Guldene Zeepard,” carrying Peter Nuyts to the embassy in Japan, sailed along the south coast from Cape Leeuwin, and sighted the whole shore of the Great Bight. But alike on the northern and southern seaboard, the aspect of New Holland, as it was then called, presented an uninviting appearance.
An important era of discovery began with Tasman's voyage of 1642. He, too, sailed from Batavia ; but, first crossing the Indian Ocean to the Mauritius, he descended to the 44th parallel of S. lat, recrossing that ocean to the east. By taking this latter course he reached the island which now bears his name, but which he called Van Diemen's Land, after the Dutch governor of Batavia. In 1644 Tasman made another attempt, when he explored the north-west coast of Australia, from Arnhem Land to the 22d degree of latitude, approaching the locality of Dirk Hartog's discoveries of 1616. He seems to have landed at Cape Ford, near Victoria River, also in Roebuck Bay, and again near Dampier's Archipelago. But the hostile attitude of the natives, whom he denounced as a malicious and miserable race of savages, prevented his seeing much of the new country ; and for half a century after this no fresh discoveries were made.
The English made their first appearance on the Australian coast in 1688, when the north-western shores were visited by the famous buccaneer Captain William Dampier, who spent five weeks ashore near Roebuck Bay. A few years later (1697) the Dutch organised another expedition under Vlamingh, who, first touching at Swan River on the west coast, sailed northward to Shark's Bay, where Hartog had been in 1616. Dampier, two years later, visited the same place, not now as a roving adventurer, but with a commission from the English Admiralty to pursue his Australian researches. This enterprising navigator, in the narrative of his voyages, gives an account of the trees, birds, and reptiles he observed, and of his encounters with the natives. But he found nothing to invite a long stay. There was
