Claims that the Spanish and especially the Portuguese discovered Australia before the Dutch and English have gained a good deal of credence since they were first advanced. The matter is of some interest to the Geelong area ...

The author responds to a review of his book, 'Was Australia Charted before 1606?', justifying his reasoning in point form.

The Dutch, under Willem Janszoon in the Duyfken, and the British, under James Cook in the Endeavour, have long been known to have reached Australia's shores in 1606 and 1770 respectively. For more than two centuries a ...

The age-old concept that a vast southern landmass must of necessity exist to counterbalance that in the northern hemisphere was given graphic expression by many cartographers, including Ptolemy, Johannes Schoener and Oronce ...

The latter half of the 20th century has witnessed a veritable spate of reports in the press about the finding of historical artifacts concerning whose significance sensational claims have been made.

Within the last few years historians of cartography have become increasingly aware of the potential value of toponymy for the elucidation of early cartographical enigmas. One of the most notorious of these is the real ...

Too many people today expect early maps and charts of newly discovered lands to have similar standards of accuracy. They are unaware of how incredibly inaccurate many were. Information from different sources could be ...

The Harleian and other Dieppe maps made in France in the mid-16th century are manifestly based on Portuguese originals, yet no surviving Portuguese maps show any evidence of this mysterious landmass. Suggestions that the ...

Alexander Dalrymple was by no means alone in assuming that Jave-la-Grande was Australia. James Burney stated that he found too many similarities between the east coast of Jave-la-Grande and the then known outline of ...

In this book Brigadier Fitzgerald summarises the arguments for and against the identification of the apparent continent of Jave-la-Grande as Australia, as provided by some, but by no means all of those who have written on ...