Читать книгу Australian History For Dummies - Alex McDermott - Страница 102

In 1803 the explorer Matthew Flinders circumnavigated the Australian continent in the Investigator. The only thing was the continent wasn’t called Australia. The western side of the continent had been named New Holland in the 17th century (which you can read more about in Chapter 2), while the eastern side of the continent was named New South Wales by Captain Cook after he’d sailed up along it in 1770 (refer to Chapter 3). Now that Flinders had gone around charting every nook and cranny of the continent, people could say for sure that no gulf or strait separated the two.

But what to call it? Flinders quite liked the Latin name that had been used in ancient Rome — Terra Australis, or ‘southern land’. But the Latin seemed a bit old fashioned. So he changed it to Australia. Not everyone liked it — Sir Joseph Banks (the botanist on Cook’s voyage and powerful patron of the settlement thereafter), for instance, thought it sounded terrible. So strongly did people not like it that when Flinders published his book in 1814 (just before he died), it was titled A Voyage to Terra Australis, rather than A Voyage to Australia. But in the intervening decade (between Flinders circumnavigating the continent and publishing his book) the name Australia had begun to stick with ordinary people living in the colony of NSW. Macquarie liked it, and in 1817 he formally requested that the name be used in dispatches and official correspondence. The Governor who came after Macquarie, Thomas Brisbane, liked the name so much that he called his daughter Eleanor Australia.