I tried to write a follow-up post to The Invention of Australia (Part 1), but I went down so many different rabbit-holes while writing part 2 that I have decided that I will make this post into a timeline, and then follow up with more posts going into these events in the timeline.

The main point I want to show here is that the British wanted to claim New Holland – which was already claimed by the Dutch. The terra Australis incognita became synonymous with the discoveries of Quirós due to his over-exaggerated and widely published accounts of Austrialia del Espiritu Santo; an island in Vanuatu. The British exploited this by conflating Quirós’s accounts and naming of the island with New Holland, and through the magic of words transformed New Holland into a British-owned “Australia”. “Captain Cook discovered Australia for the British” was the end resulting narrative.

It is good to see how this happened, because this narrative of “Captain Cook discovered Australia for the British” is now being dismantled, and very similar tricks are being used to construct the replacement narrative. The replacement is that Australia was settled 50,000 years ago by the “First Australians” coming across on a land bridge. It is just as warped as the story it replaces – especially from a political perspective as the so-called “First Australians” were never part of the Australian polity.

So here is the timeline, I will edit this as I go to add posts in this series;

• 1605-1606 Quirós/Torres Voyage (see PART 1)
• 1642 Abel Tasman’s voyage formally claims possession of Van Diemen’s Land
• 1762-1764 British occupation of Manila (Philippines) where Torres’ journals are stashed away
  • Dalrymple goes through Manila documents, finds Torres’ account of the Torres Strait and Espiritu Santo
• 1770 Cook’s 1st voyage that “discovered Australia”. (see PART 1 about how he was looking for Quirós’s bay with two rivers.)
• 1771 Alexander Dalrymple releases book An Historical Collection of Voyages and Discoveries in the South Pacific Ocean revealing to wide audiences the existence of the Torres Strait – just after Cook has exploited that knowledge. Darlymple suggests using the term “Australia” to apply to a quarter of the globe (southern eastern hemisphere)
• 1773 Tobias Furneaux probably discovers the Bass Strait in a covert mission
• c1800 Matthew Flinders suggests using the name “Australia” as a geographical term
• 1806 Torres’s account published with permission of Dalrymple by James Burney (English) in A Chronological History of Discoveries in the Pacific V2. This book uses the term Australia or Australia del Espiritu Santo to refer to the Vanuatu island, and uses the Great Terra Australis to refer to the New Holland continent.
• 1814 Flinders publishes his book A voyage to Terra Australis about New Holland
• 1824 Anglo-Dutch treaty leads to British expansion into New Holland. Moreton Bay settlement established at Redcliffe.
• 1832 “Western Australia” named
• 1876 Quirós’s journal published in Spanish (Historia del descubrimiento de las regiones austriales, Zaragoza/Luis de Belmonte Bernandez). This translation calls out earlier English translations of material (eg. Burney) in the footnotes for incorrectly spelling Austrialia as Australia.
• 1895 Cardinal Moran suggests Port Curtis as being discovered by Quirós
• 1901 “Australia”, the political entity formed. Queen Victoria dies
• 1904 Quirós’s journal published in English (Markham/Hakluyt society).