oddlight

Nation's naming mystery

A historical foundation stone may have to be reconsidered after the discovery of a 16th century German map that used the word "Australia" 259 years before the explorer Matthew Flinders bestowed the name on the continent he had just circumnavigated.

An 1804 map, published in the book Flinders wrote about his voyage that appeared on the day he died in 1814, is generally credited as the first map to assign the name Australia.

But the National Library of Australia has acquired a 1545 book containing a world map with the southern hemisphere land mass titled Australia - the proper noun form of the Latin word Australis.

The library's map curator, Maura O'Connor, said the map posed intriguing questions: "Was Flinders aware of the 1545 work when he suggested the name Australia in 1804, or was it that both authors were simply using the noun form of the Latin word as a more suitable name for the land mass?"

The map is in the book Astronomia-Teutsch Astronomei, published in Frankfurt by Cyriaco Jacob zum Barth. It examines astronomical knowledge and includes woodcut illustrations. Ms O'Connor said the library acquired the book last year.

Australian maps authority and author Dorothy F. Prescott of Melbourne said Flinders was probably familiar with the German astronomical work.

"Flinders sailed by the stars and would have had access to a lot of books on astronomy, and it may well be that he saw the German map," she said. "When Flinders was starting out, a lot of people in England were starting to refer to Terra Australis or New Holland as Australia."

Another map that would have influenced Flinders, Mrs Prescott said, was Captain James Wilson's A Missionary Voyage to the South Pacific Ocean, performed in the years 1796, 1797,1798 in the ship Duff from 1799. "The Wilson book contained a map that actually used the words 'Greater Australia' - taking in Captain Cook's map of the east coast and the south and east coasts of Van Diemens Land," she said.

Officialdom had embraced the name by 1830. It had appeared by then in Admiralty Hydrographical Office publications.

...from smh