Arts/Hist: Naming Australia

Flinders' map of Terra Australis, soon to be Australia.

Before you could call any group of people “Australian”, you needed a place called “Australia” for them to live in. You might think the colonists would want to put a name on the place they had settled (or invaded), but James Cook had already named one side when he mapped the east coast in 1770. He called it “New South Wales”, based on some fancied resemblance to the southern coast of Wales (I’m part-Welsh, I’ve been there and I can’t see it). On the west side, the Dutch navigators called that part “New Holland”. The invaders on the east coast were in New South Wales, end of discussion.

Until Matthew Flinders’ later mapping voyage in the early 1800s, people were uncertain whether or not these two coasts were part of a single land mass or two lumps separated by a sea channel, so there was no need for a collective name. Flinders is usually identified as the first person to use the name ‘Australia’, in his book, A Voyage to Terra Australis, published in 1814, so here is what Flinders wrote:

It is necessary, however, to geographical precision, that so soon as New Holland and New South Wales were known to form one land, there should be a general name applicable to the whole…I have…ventured upon the readoption of the original TERRA AUSTRALIS, and of this term I shall hereafter make use, when speaking of New Holland and New South Wales, in a collective sense…the adjacent isles, including that of Van Diemen, must be understood to be comprehended.”
— From Matthew Flinders, A Voyage to Terra Australis, vol 1, iii.

Having mentioned ‘Terra Australis’, Flinders then added this footnote:

Had I permitted myself any innovation upon the original term, it would have been to convert it into AUSTRALIA; as being more agreeable to the ear, and an assimilation to the names of the other great portions of the earth.

As it turns out, The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser had printed an interesting poem by Michael Massey Robinson (of whom there will be more in the next chapter) in January 1813. The relevant verse ran:

From Albion’s blest Isle have we cross’d the wide Main,
And brav’d all the Dangers, of Neptune’s Domain—
The Hurricane’s Whirlwind, the Tempest’s loud Roar,
An Asylum to find on Australia’s rude Shore
For the Genius of Britain sent forth a Decree,
That her Sons should be exil’d—once more to be free!
— The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, 30 January 1813, 3, http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/628623

Robinson’s poem was a year ahead of Flinders’ book, but even earlier, a Sydney news story in the same journal in 1804 mentioned Guy Fawkes’ night in Sydney, suggesting that it was “…the first Australian Fête in commemoration…” (The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, 11 November 1804, 3, https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/626493/6011)

Even earlier, in 1793, George Shaw and James Edward Smith had published the first volume of a planned two-volume work called Zoology and Botany of New Holland. That first volume covered animals only, and on page 2, the careful reader might find this comment:

The vast Island or rather Continent of Australia, Australasia, or New Holland…seems to abound in scenes of peculiar wildness and sterility…

Smith’s botany section, if it was ever written, never came out. Shaw wrote up the animals, so he alone must garner the credit for the first use of ‘Australia’. In the Transactions of the Linnaean Society 4, 213 (1798), Smith called the continent ‘Australasia’ several times. The name ‘Australasia’ was also certainly known before Flinders went into print, because a piece of verse in The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser in 1808 mentions “Australasia’s Black tribe”. (The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, 6 November 1808, 2, http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/627622)

Within a few years of Flinders’ book coming out, Governor Macquarie was calling the colony and its surrounds ‘Australia’ in dispatches to London, and in 1824, Sir Thomas Brisbane, Macquarie’s successor as governor of New South Wales, was delighted when his wife presented him with an heir, whom he named Thomas Australia Makdougall Brisbane. The land, the continent, the future nation and its new inhabitants, had a name.

It would just take a bit longer for these new, invading Australians to realise that they were different, that in some ways, they were better than the people they had left behind in Britain—and even longer to realise that in a number of ways, the people they were supplanting were better than these new Australians.

To search this blog, use this link and then use the search box

Another way: use the index!