Page:History of New South Wales from the records, Volume 1.djvu/186

 86 AUSTRALIA A HUNDRED YEARS AGO. 1787 A problem unsolved. Flinders's suggestion. His charts. Who it was that originally applied the name Anstralia to the land once known to geographers as Terra Australia Incog- nita, and afterwards as New Holland, has been a standing subject of discussion for many years. When Phillip was sent out on his colonising expedition, the word Australia was certainly not in common use. The whole of the territory included within the limits of his Commission was known as New South Wales ; the rest of the continent still retaining the title given by the Dutchmen to that portion of it which they claimed by virtue of discovery.* It was not till many years afterwards that these names gave place to that of Aus- tralia as the designation of the whole continent. Flinders has been generally credited with the selection, or at least with the first public application of the word, in his Voyage to Terra Australis, published in 1814, in which he wrote : — Had I permitted myself any innovation upon the original term. Terra Australis, it would have been to convert it into Australia, as bein^ more agreeable to the ear and an assimilation to the names of the other great portions of the earth. The collection of charts published with the narrative of his voyage contains a preliminary one entitled — ^^ Greneral Chart of Terra Australis, or Australia.*' This chart having Tasman's second voyage in 1644, was Terra Australis or Great South Land ; and when it was displaced by New Holland, the new term was applied only to the parts lying westward of a meridian line passing through Amheim's Land on the north, and near the Isles of St. Francis and St. Peter on the south ; all to the eastward, including the shores of the Guli|h of Carpen- taria, still remained as Terra Austrahs.*' — Flinders, Introduction, p. ii. Digitized by Google
 * ' ' The original name, used hy the Dutch themselves until some time after