The discovery of Australia and its name

Aboriginal legend describes a Dreamtime when a Rainbow Serpent created the Australian world. The serpent emerged from beneath the earth and as she moved, winding from side to side, she forced her way through soil and rocks, making the great rivers flow from her path. From her body sprang the tribes, the animals and the birds of Australia. According to the fossil record, the first humans moved to Australia 70000 years ago from New Guinea. These humans were known as “Robust” due to heavy-boned physical form. 20000 years later they were followed by the more slender-boned “Gracile”, the ancestors of the modern day Aborigines. Complicating the scientific record is the discovery of Mungo Man, a primate whose ritually-buried remains from 62000 years ago have been found but whose DNA can`t be categorized into any line of human evolution.

It is not clear why the Gracile race became dominant over the Robust race and why Mungo Man disappeared altogether. Perhaps there was a war, perhaps there was disease or the Gracile bred the others out of existence. By the time Europeans arrived there were about 700 distinct Aboriginal tribes, each with their own unique traditions, languages and customs. Although these distinct tribes had commonalities, their cultures were as different from one another as English culture is different from French one. Unfortunately, as in North America, the new settlers set about grabbing land and exterminating the inhabitants.

Australia is a name that comes from the Latin word “australis”, meaning southern. Perhaps its earlier form Terra Australis, meaning South Land, referred to a supposed southern continent. It was used on several early maps, notably in the world chart of 1569 prepared by Flemish geographer Mercator. The Portuguese navigator Pedro Fernandez de Quiros reached the New Hebrides in 1606 and gave the name Australis del Espiritu Santo (Southern Land of the Holy Spirit) to all of the southern regions as far as the South Pole. From 1642, when Dutch explorer Abel Tasman sighted the coast of Tasmania, which he considered part of the southern continent, the continent became known as Nova Hollandia. The earliest recorded use of the present from Australia appears to have been in Alexander Dalrymple`s collection of “Voyages of the South Seas”. Captain James Cook referred to the continent as New Holland, but in 1770 claimed the eastern coast in the name of New South Wales. Governor Lachlan Macquarie began using the name Australia in official correspondence after 1817 when he received Admiralty charts based on the work of Flinders. These charts used the terms Australia and Great Australian Bight. The British government continued to prefer the name New South Wales. But Macquarie had given official approval to a word that was already gaining in popular use. By 1824, the name Australia was in common use.

The first English explorers to reach Australia were Willem Dampier in 1688 and James Cook, who in 1770 claimed the eastern two-thirds of the continent for Britain, despite orders from King George III to first conclude a treaty with indigenous population. He reported to London that Australia was uninhabited. It provided impetus for the establishment of a penal colony there instead of the lost American colonies. The colony of New South Wales was established in Sydney by captain and the governor Arthur Phillip on January 26, 1788 as a British Crown Colony. The date of arrival of the First Fleet later became the date of Australian Day. The Colony of Van Diemen`s Land was founded in 1803. The rest of the continent, that is Western Australia, was formally claimed by the United Kingdom in 1829. Following the spread of British settlement, separate Colonies were created from parts of New South Wales: South Australia in 1836, Victoria in 1851 and Queensland in 1859. The Northern Territory was founded as part of the colony of South Australia, in 1863. During the period of 1855-1890, the six Crown Colonies each successively became self-governing colonies, which managed most of their own affairs. The British government retained control of some matters, especially foreign affairs, defence and international shipping.

Despite its heavily rural based economy Australia remained highly urbanized, centered particularly around cities of Melbourne and Sydney. In the 1880-s “Marvelous Melbourne” was the second largest city in the British Empire. Australia also gained a reputation as a “working man`s paradise” and as a laboratory for social reform with the world`s first secret ballot and first national Labour Party government. On January 1, 1901, federation of the colonies occurred and the Commonwealth of Australia was born, as a dominion of the British Empire. The Australian Capital Territory, centred on the new federal capital of Canberra, was separated from New South Wales in 1911. Although Australia had become independent, the British government retained some powers over Australia until the Statute of Westminster in 1931, and the authority of the United Kingdom Parliament was not completely severed until 1986. Indigenous Australians, Aborigines, were also generally denied both citizenship and vote until the Constitution was altered by referendum in 1967.