Australia with as much industry as the Portuguese had displayed in exploring that of Africa a century and a half earlier. In 1616 Dirk Hartog, in the Endraaght, discovered the land which is named after his ship, and the cape and roadstead to which his own name has been given. Jan Edels left his name on the western coast in 1619, and in 1622 the ship Leeuwin or Lioness reached the most western point of the continent, to which its name is still attached. Five years later Peter de Nuyts sailed around the south coast, and the same year Carpenter, in the Dutch service, entered the Gulf of Carpentaria. Abel Jansen Tasman was sent out from Batavia in 1642 to investigate the real extent of the Southern Land. Going wide of Cape Leeuwin, he hit upon the land to which he gave the name of the governor-general at Batavia, or of his daughter Marie, with whom Tasman is reported to have been in love. Van Diemen's Land, which is now more generally known as Tasmania. Tasman kept on, and by sailing east proved that there was no connection between this land, which he supposed joined with the Australian continent, and the greater continent about the southern pole, whose extent had been vastly exaggerated by all the earlier geographers from the days of Ptolemy. He touched New Zealand and then returned to Batavia, having settled many of the geographical problems regarding this part of the world. Two years later Tasman probably continued his explorations in the neighborhood of the Gulf of Carpentaria, and it was at this time that the name New Holland was given to the continent. This name continued to be the one most commonly used until the middle of the Nineteenth Century, when the name Australia, probably first suggested by Matthew Flinders in his Voyage to Terra Australis, began to supplant it. Neither the land nor the natives, which had been seen by these several voyagers, offered anything to induce further exploration on behalf of commercial or political interests.
For a century and a quarter the Southern Land was left largely to itself, until a purely scientific expedition was dispatched thither. Capt. James Cook, commanding the Endeavour, was sent to Tahiti to observe the transit of Venus on June 3, 1769. This successfully ac- complished, he continued to New Zealand, pass- ing through the strait which bears his name. On April 20, 1770, he reached a land hitherto unknown to the map makers, and the naturalist of his party, Joseph Banks, found in the neigh- borhood of their anchorage so many specimens of plants entirely new to science that they named the place Botany Bay. Cook coasted north, almost losing his ship on the Great Barrier Reef, but by keeping inside along the coast, until he had passed Endeavor Strait, he proved that this land was distinct from New Guinea. He gave the name of New South Wales to the land he had coasted, from some resemblance that he saw to the shores about the English Swansea. Return- ing to England, Cook was sent out again in 1772 to continue his explorations. From the Cape of Good Hope he zigzagged across toward Australia, and thence to Cape Horn, to see if any land- marks remained undiscovered in those seas. Cook's reports led to talk of settling the south- ern continent and claiming it for England. In 1788 Captain Philips landed some convicts at Botany Bay, where Sydney now is, and from this
time on the English have steadily stretched out along the coasts and inland. In 1797 a naval surgeon named Bass started south with six men in a whaleboat from Port Jackson and proved the existence of open water, now called by his name, between the continent and Tasmania. One of Bass's companions, two years later, sailed east- ward from Cape Leeuwin along the southern coast. At Encounter Bay he met a French ship, and named the spot in consequence of the inci- dent. He proceeded as far as Port Philip. The Australian coast-line was all practically deter- mined when, in 1822, Capt. P. P. King completed his five-year voyages of investigation of the river mouths of the continent.
The successful exploration of the interior be- gan with Philip Wentworth's journey across the Blue Mountains of the east coast in 181.3, to the fertile plateau beyond. The next year Evans discovered the Lachlan and Macquarie rivers, and penetrated the Bathurst plains. Captain Sturt, in 1818-29, succeeded in dispelling the notion which had gained currency of a great in- land sea, but in its place he, substituted the more discouraging one of a vast lifeless desert. This seemed to be confirmed when, in 1847, the German, Leichhardt, who had previously crossed overland from New South ales to Port Essing- ton, in North Australia, started to traverse the continent from Queensland to Western Australia, and was never heard of again. In 1860 Burke and Wills, with an outfit furnished by the colony of Victoria, successfully crossed the eastern por- tion of the island from north to south, and between 1858 and 1862 John M'Douall Stuart performed the much more difficult feat of cross- ing from south to north, near the middle, in order to trace a course for the telegraph line which was erected shortly afterwards. Scattered settlers and ranchers had by this time opened up practically all of the eastern regions, but the western deserts remained a blank on the map. Between 1868 and 1874 John Forrest penetrated from Western Australia as far as the central telegraph line, and Ernest Giles did the same from the north between 1872 and 1876. These two routes were joined in 1897, when the Hon. Daniel Carnegie successfully accomplished the journey by the direct route from the Coolgardie gold-fields in the south to those of Kimberley in the north. Other expeditions under Gosse and Warburton in 1873 and H. V. Barclay in 1878 added materially to the knowledge of the country west of the central telegraph line. More recent- ly the discovery of gold has resulted in numerous prospecting parties going into nearly every sec- tion of the uncultivated interior, with corre- sponding advantage to geographic information.
Bibliography. General Works. — Jung, Der Weltteil Australien (Leipzig, 1882-83); Reclus,The Earth and its Inhabitants. Oceanica (New York, 1890); Wallace, "Australia and New Zealand" in Stanford's Compendium of Geography and Travel (London, 1894); Sievers, Australien und Ozeanien (Leipzig, 1895); Lauterer. Australien und Tasmanien (Freiburg, 1900); Schanz, Australien und die Südsee (Berlin, 1901); Ranken, The Federal Geography of British Australasia (Sydney, 1891); id., The Dominion of Australia (London, 1874); Trollope, Australia and New Zealand (Leipzig, 1873).
Physical Features. — Barton, Outlines of Australian Physiography (Maryborough, 1895);
