Outlines
Australians are used to the notion that important things tend to happen elsewhere, and, in many ways, they do. However, as far as the history of exploration is concerned, Australia sits at the end of a narrative that starts before the Portuguese ventured into the Atlantic and ends with James Cook's track along Australia's east coast.
Until Lopes Gonçalves crossed the Equator two-thirds of the way through the 15th century, the Southern Hemisphere was a blank slate. Still, Europeans had ideas about what might lie there. Perceptions and Misconceptions explores those notions at length. Contacts? Investigates the sources that may have influenced some of those notions. From there, the rest of Prelude: Toracing an Outline looks at the processes that brought the first European travellers to Australia's shores.
So, three hundred years after Gonçalves, Cook's track along Australia's east coast more or less completes the continent's outline. In between, after Willem Jansz made the first known sighting of the continent, Dutch voyages delivered an outline of a land mass stretching from New Guinea's bird's head to the head of the Great Australian Bight. With a section of what Tasman called Van Diemen's Land to the south, the last temperate continent was more or less delineated.
While Cook's first voyage demolished notions of a temperate Terra Australis Incognita, nay-sayers prompted a second expedition that removed any remaining doubts. His third voyage looked to answer the last great unanswered question about the temperate world's coastal geography: does the long-sought Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific exist? From there, the standard histories switch to focus on terrestrial exploration. Continental coastlines between the Arctic and Antarctic Circles had, by and large, been pencilled in. What lay in the various unknown interiors? Australia receives the occasional nod, but the main narratives involve the search for legendary locations and answers to long-unanswered questions.
Still, the ninety-odd years between Cook's track along the east coast and the first settlers' arrival in The North saw extensive activity around Australia's coastline as French and English navigators dealt with unanswered questions after the British decision to establish a penal colony at Botany Bay that was never a mere dumping ground for convicts. That decision seems to have been made in a hurry, to reinforce British claims to the eastern seaboard. At the very least, Botany Bay would become a self-supporting location where Britain's criminal classes could be safely exiled. The colony might also deliver any number of benefits.So, for thirty years after 1788, British activity around Australia's coast focussed on reinforcing the territorial claim, keeping the Frenchmen out and seeking the river system that would deliver access to the continent's interior.
After 1820, as sheep entered the equation and squatters took up extensive tracts of land regardless of government regulations, the blank spaces on maps of the continent's southeast corner slowly disappeared. Ludwig Leichhardt's expedition to Port Essington delivered tempting pastoral prospects along the Burdekin River's upper reaches. Edmund Kennedy's journey from Rockingham Bay to the tip of Cape York produced less. Still, it provided a degree of pathos to match Burke and Wills's sorry saga. Meanwhile, the rest of The North remained as a slightly more detailed outline, thanks to occasional visits to a few well-known locations like the Endeavour River that usually lasted as long as it took to refill the ship's water casks and gather firewood.
Links to add:
New Guinea's bird's head
Great Australian Bight
Van Diemen's Land
Northwest Passage
Botany Bay
Ludwig Leichhardt
Port Essington
Burdekin River
Edmund Kennedy
Rockingham Bay
Burke and Wills
Endeavour River
