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South
Australian Maritime Museum
200th Anniversary of the First chart which named our Continent
"Australia"
Friday, 29th October, 2004
Thank you
Mr Jones, Auntie Josie Agius and Keith for your welcome.
Commander Peters, representing the Senior Naval Officer, South
Australia;
Mr Vic Warrington, Consul for the United Kingdom;
Mr Tom Young, Honorary Consul for the Republic of Mauritius;
Your Worship the Mayor of the City of Port Adelaide, Ms Fiona
Barr and Councillors Joyce Snadden and Carole Martin;
Ms Margaret Anderson, Director of the History Trust of South Australia;
Descendants of the family of Matthew Flinders;
Ladies and Gentlemen.
What a great
pleasure it is to join you all at this gathering to recall the
legacy of Matthew Flinders to our state and our nation.
Matthew Flinders,
and his French contemporary, Nicolas Baudin, produced the first
charts of the South Australian coast. They named its bays, its
headlands and islands, and scientists on their voyages produced
the first published studies of its flora and fauna.
Flinders'
voyage was arguably the first circumnavigation of the continent.
He proved that the great south land was indeed one land mass,
and his proposal led to the eventual adoption of the name Australia.
While these
celebrated British and French explorers introduced southern Australia
to European science, they were learning about a land that had
been deeply understood and cared for by the Kaurna People for
tens of thousands of years. I thank Aunty Josie Agius for her
welcome today and I pay my respects to the Kaurna People, the
traditional owners of the land on which we stand.
The histories
of those voyages have captured the imagination and the respect
of South Australians, and it was good to see the enthusiasm with
which the Encounter 2002 events were celebrated.
The Encounter
celebrations marked the 200th anniversary of the meeting between
Flinders and Baudin in Encounter Bay in April 1802. Today, we
mark another anniversary.
It is the
anniversary of an event that took place in Mauritius in 1804.
Both explorers overcame many adversities during their voyages,
but both were overcome by fate when they stopped in Mauritius
on their returns to Britain and France. Tragically Nicolas Baudin
died of illness on Mauritius in September 1803.
Matthew Flinders
met a different fate. He arrived in Mauritius at a time when Britain
was at war with France, and was detained for nine years. During
that time he continued to work, and in the later months of 1804
he drafted his first chart of the great south land.
At that time,
European geography did not have an agreed name for this continent,
and its coasts had not been defined.
Ptolemy had
guessed at the existence of a southern land 2000 years ago and
he had named it Terra Australis Incognita, meaning unknown south
land.
In the 17th
century a number of Dutch navigators had encountered the west
coast and named it New Holland. James Cook charted and named the
east New South Wales in 1770. However, the southern coast was
unknown and the north coast was incomplete. It was not clear whether
New Holland in the west and New South Wales in the east were indeed
part of the same continent, and some respected geographers thought
a body of water might divide the land in two.
Flinders'
voyage proved there was one continent and, 200 years ago on Mauritius,
he produced his first chart of the great south land and proposed
that it be named Australia. Flinders titled his map 'Australia
or Terra Australis'.
While the
shape of our coast and the name of our continent are things that
we take for granted today, in 1804 it was new and controversial.
When Flinders posted his chart to London in November 1804, the
British Admiralty rejected the name 'Australia' which he proposed,
and when Flinders' chart was finally published in 1814, his title
was inverted to read 'Terra Australis or Australia'.
The debate
continued. When the Governor of New South Wales, Lachlan Macquarie,
received a copy of Flinders' chart in 1817, he formally proposed
that the name Australia should be adopted but the Admiralty again
opposed it. Nonetheless, the name entered common usage in the
colonies it was used in the proclamation of South Australia in
1836. It was formally adopted for the Commonwealth of Australia
in 1901.
I am delighted
to mark the anniversary of Flinders' proposal to name Australia.
I am very
pleased to accept this chart. I will present it to State Parliament
on 11 November as a reminder of the history of the naming of our
state and our nation.
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