AlternateRoute

So says the plinth on which a statue of Captain Cook stands in Hyde Park in Sydney.
I have always had a difficulty with the concept (initially drummed into me at school), that Captain Cook “discovered Australia”.

For a start, the Kooris that Cook saw, had been on the land for at least 40,000 years, so it is a very Eurocentric concept of discovery.

But what about the Dutch who came before Cook?
By 1644, the Dutch had comprehensively mapped the Northern, Southern and Western coasts of Australia and the oldest European structures in Australia are the makeshift forts built by the survivors of the Batavia wreck in 1629. The place was even marked on the maps as New Holland.

Some argue that Cook “discovered the East Coast”. but given that the other three coasts had already been mapped, finding the fourth is hardly an achievement. Far from exploring, it seems as if Cook knew exactly where he was going. As soon as he left New Zealand he took a bearing that led him almost exactly to the most southern part of the east coast.

But did someone else make it to Australia and the east coast before the Dutch and the English? In Peter Trickett’s book “Beyond Capricorn” he gives fairly convincing evidence that the Portuguese explored and mapped the east coast in 1520. The main evidence comes from a realignment of a French map, believed to have been drawn from a Portuguese original and is back up by further physical evidence. Among these are a lead sinker of French or Portuguese origin, dating from the 1500s found off Fraser Island, and Portuguese pottery of the same era found off Gabo Island.

On top of this are Portuguese canons found at an Aboriginal sacred site in Western Australia, and traditional tales of “men with skin like turtles” (ie wearing armour) who visited the area many years before.

Piece by Piece Trickett puts together the evidence and I for one think that it is very feasible. I have always found it difficult to believe that a continent the size of Australia had gone unnoticed for such a long time.

The book is easy to read, but goes into great detail matching sections of the map to features on the Australian coast and hence it is a relatively long book. However, anyone with a love of maps or a love of Australian history should read this book.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 5th, 2007 at 1832 and is filed under Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.