Comment: The Discovery of Australia

I think it's reasonable to state that the Portuguese were the earliest mappers of Australia, in the early 1500's. The Portuguese and the Spanish ruled the seas in this era, as evidenced by their arrogance in their agreement of the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas, to divide one half of the world into Portuguese territory and one half into Spanish territory!

The Portuguese sea charts of that era were kept secret, because of fears of other countries territorial searches and claims and the Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 destroyed virtually all those early maps.

As a result, we're left with a pretty poor record of what mapping was actually done by these great seapowers in this era. No doubt locals in SE Asia knew something about the Great South Land - but no records exist anywhere of maps made of the Southern areas of land, before the 1500's, because no country had done the specific searching and mapping of the unknown lands beyond the Old World before this time.

It's likely that the Portuguese and Spanish made use of local fishermans knowledge, but it's highly unlikely that any nation had maps of Southern land areas before the Portuguese and Spanish ventured into these "unknown" areas.

These Portuguese and Spanish adventurers were a brave, adventurous, and hardy lot.
Christopher Columbus set off with no maps and endured a near mutiny by his crew, who were convinced they were going to sail off the edge of the "flat" Earth!

Cheers - Ron.

The north of Australia was well known through the voyages of Torres, Hartog, Tasman and Dampier in the early to late 1600s.

Tasman also covered much of South and south east WA - discovered Tasmania and New Zealand. I was always taught Cook discovered Australia but he already knew it was there but not mapped so he just filled many of the blanks.

When the Batavia went aground in 1629 the West Coast was already well known.

Torres was probably the first but there had always been rumours of a large land mass (not Terra Australia Incognito) and this is what the Spanish and Dutch were looking for.Cook was looking for the much larger Terra Australia Incognito and proved it did not exist.

Garry