ABSTRACT

Australia was discovered and put on the map, coast by coast, by Portuguese, Dutch, and British explorers over a period of some two hundred years, between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Earliest Oriental notions about the world knew nothing of Western theories concerning the existence of a Southland, about which the Aristotelian school had speculated on the assumption that there had to be land in the south to act as a counterweight to the Eurasian mass of land in the north. The version of Nagakubo Sekisui is best known and it went through several editions. The Dutch had not been able to discover the passage which separated New Guinea from Australia, nor had they sailed along Australia’s east coast, which remained an uncharted terra incognita until Captain Cook’s arrival in 1770; further, Tasman had seen only parts of Tasmania and New Zealand, and had not actually circumnavigated them as islands.