Great Southern Land

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

The Profit of the State

The Afflicted State

Uneasy City

Building the Trireme

First Blood

The Companion Guide to the Lake District

A History of Hong Kong

Dangerous Deceits

A History of South Africa

The Four Nations

FRANK WELSH

Great Southern Land

A New History of Australia

ALLEN LANE

an imprint of

PENGUIN BOOKS

ALLEN LANE

Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia
Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2
Penguin Books India (P) Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India
Penguin Group (NZ), Cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

www.penguin.com

First published 2004
1

Copyright © Frank Welsh, 2004

The moral right of the author has been asserted

All rights reserved.
Without limiting the rights under copyright
reserved above, no part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior
written permission of both the copyright owner and
the above publisher of this book

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

EISBN: 978–0–141–90978–3

For Lotte and Harry

Contents

List of Illustrations

Photographic acknowledgements are given in parentheses.

Acknowledgements

Where to begin? In the last six years or so of writing, generous help has been proffered by many people and organizations. Much of my research has been done in Sydney’s State and Mitchell Libraries, whose staff have for long been patiently helpful, and whose library, shop and tea room are patterns of their kind. Thanks are also due to the staff of the La Trobe Collection in the Victoria State Library, the Battye Library in Perth, the John Oxley Library in Brisbane, the National Library and the National War Memorial in Canberra, the New South Wales Records Office, the Mortlock Library and the Art Gallery in Adelaide and the Darwin Museum and Library, the British Library, the Public Records Office and the Institute of Commonwealth Studies in London, the Cambridge and Durham University Libraries and Rhodes House Oxford. In the USA thanks are due to Hugh Howard of the State Department Archives, the staff of the Library of Congress and the National Archives in Washington and the George Bush Library in College Station, Texas. Robert Maxtone Graham provided one essential reference and Dick Brown an equally essential illustration.

Advice and guidance was welcomed from Robert Lawrie, Roger Bell, Elizabeth Warburton, Angus Trumble, Gerard Henderson and Bob MacIllrae. Henry Reynolds’ and Carl Bridge’s suggestions, corrections and emendations were invaluable: any errors remaining are due entirely to my own carelessness or perversity (or, as Dr Johnson was not ashamed to admit ‘ignorance Madam, pure ignorance’).

Hospitality from family and friends was essential, and greatly appreciated; to all the Eltringhams in Horsham, Fishers in Melbourne, Gaskells and Welshes in Sydney and Hoods in Brisbane, many thanks for sheltering and feeding Agnes and me, for indeed without them this book could not have been attempted. Getting to and from Australia was rendered slightly less painful by Jill Weston of Thomas Cook.

Both Stuart Proffitt and Liz Friend-Smith at Penguin Press have done far more than any reasonable person could expect in reading drafts and providing support and encouragement: Elizabeth Stratford performed the appalling task of copy-editing an idiosyncratic typescript, which she bore with admirable fortitude, and Richard Duguid faced the author’s quibbles with calm forbearance. But when all is said and done, without the patient industry of Agnes, ably seconded by Kirsten, this book would never have been finished.

In preparing the second edition I should add, with gratitude, the names of Harriet O’Malley and Peter Mckay. Peter Coleman has corrected me on the height of Sir John Kerr and on the correct title of the GST. Helpful comments were received from John Kinsella and Stuart Macintyre, while Margaret Simon did much to clarify the Hindmarsh Island bridge affair, and Helen Bird produced some remarkable speedy and thorough research.

Maps

MAP 3. Australia in the northern hemisphere

MAP 4. The Continent of Sahul

Wallace’s Line commemorates the work of the nineteenth-century naturalist Alfred Wallace, defining the division between Asian and Australasian flora and fauna; but many Australasian species do not penetrate beyond the continental shelf indicated here.

MAP 5. Charting the coasts

The dotted line represents uncharted coastline.

Map 6. The ‘Nineteen Counties’ — the settlement of New South Wales

The Nineteen Counties comprise only about one-tenth of the present area of New South Wales (500,000 square miles) but two-thirds of the state’s population live there.

MAP 7. The Settlement of Van Diemen’s Land

Geography dictates the pattern of settlement in Tasmania. A third of the total area of 38,500 square miles is taken up by the rugged Western Tiers, which include an extensive National Park. Hobart and Launceston, with populations of some 200,000 and 100,000 respectively, are the only two large towns, some 100 miles apart. The most substantial of the other communities are strung along the pleasant north coast.

MAP 8. Exploration in the south-east

MAP 9. One colony to six in seventy-five years

A. 1786: New South Wales, as annexed in 1770: the mother colony. At the time Van Diemen’s Land was not known to be an island.

B. 1827: The boundary of Western Australia fixed at 129 degrees east. From 1825 Van Diemen’s Land government separated from New South Wales.

C. 1836: South Australia carved out of the enlarged New South Wales: the dog-leg appears.

D. 1851: Followed by the little state of Victoria, soon to be richer than the mother colony.

E. 1859: New South Wales split by the new colony of Queensland, north of 29 degrees south.

F. 1861: The problem solved by extending South Australia north and west to the Western Australian border, eliminating the dog-leg and providing an uncomfortable problem for South Australia in the north. Queensland is allowed an extension westwards, which includes Mount Isa.

MAP 10. The settlement of Victoria

The only Australian state, apart from little Tasmania, to be on a European geographic scale, about the same size as Great Britain. The population density, at 19.2 inhabitants per square kilometre, is by some way the highest of any Australian state, although the total population at some 4.2 million is very much less than that of Great Britain (approx. 57 million). Like all other Australian states, most people live in the capital – nearly 3 million in Melbourne, and another quarter of a million in the nearby cities of Geelong and Ballarat, the largest towns in the state after Melbourne (the other goldfields town of Bendigo, population 60,000, is the fourth biggest).

Map 11. Transcontinental expeditions

MAP 12. Southern South Australia

Perhaps three-quarters of South Australia’s million and a half people live in the capital Adelaide and in the towns around the Spencer Gulf. To a great extent this concentration is dictated by the rainfall. By far the greatest part of the state is desert or semi-desert; Adelaide is the dryest of all Australian capitals. Only three indifferent roads lead north past the great salt lakes Eyre and Torrens across the near-1,000-mile border with the Northern Territory and Queensland.

MAP 13. South-west Western Australia

Western Australia’s population is overwhelmingly concentrated around the capital, Perth – some 1.3 million of a total of 1.8 million. Geraldton, 350 miles to the north, is the only sizeable town between Perth and the Timor Sea coast at Cape Londonderry – and Geraldton has fewer than 30,000 inhabitants. In the nearly 2,000 miles as the crow flies between Geraldton and the most northerly settlement at Wyndham the only centre of population is at Port Hedland. With an area of one and a half million square miles (India’s 2 million square miles shelters more than a thousand millions), Western Australia is one of the world’s most sparsely populated states.

MAP 14. Queensland

The towns of Australia’s second largest state (1,070,000 square miles) follow the east coast, more than 1,000 miles of settlement from Cooktown, where Captain Cook careened the Endeavour, to the Gold Coast, which straddles the border with New South Wales. The only inland settlement of any consequence is Mount Isa, 500 miles west of Townsville. The state’s northern boundary is formed by the islands of Badu and Saibi, only 10 miles from the New Guinea mainland.

MAP 15. The Far East is our Near North

Darwin is equidistant from Hobart and Saigon (and notably nearer to Vietnam by sea); Perth is closer to Jakarta than to Sydney; Melbourne is as near to the Antarctic pack ice as to northern Queensland. Sydney is the only state capital within easy reach of Canberra; from Perth, Darwin, Hobart and Brisbane air travel is essential.

Map 16. Aboriginal land claims

After the 1992 Mabo case, Aboriginal title was widely recognized; but as a comparison with the extent of hardened roads illustrates, this was in the least accessible and inhabited parts of the country.

Introduction

THE BEST COUNTRY IN THE WORLD?

In the course of writing this book some polite surprise has been expressed that an English writer should be attempting a history of Australia. Only very occasionally was there a hint of a subtext – what does this Pommie think he knows about our country? I could, defensively, reply that I have known Australia for more than thirty years, travelled over thousands of miles of it and am part of an extended Australian family, established for many generations, which now includes two of our own grandchildren; and perhaps hint that I have read not a little on the subject. In fact, I would use none of these excuses, but say straight out that I have spent five years on the task because I love the place and the people and that it is a privilege to write about them. Australia is probably the most successful society in the world and the most agreeable to live in.

This personal view has official support. With commendable assiduity the United Nations compiles, each year, a sort of international merit table, the Human Development Index. Countries are awarded points for their achievements in education and health care, weighting the cruder measurement of prosperity, measured by GDP (Gross Domestic Product). At the head of the list there are a few surprises; the United States never quite makes it to the top – its education indexes are a little less good than that of New Zealand, at number 19, and its life-expectancy is only marginally ahead of Cuba’s, at number 55. Similarly Ireland, with a GDP equal to that of Norway at number 1, appears only at number 18, pulled down by lower health and educational statistics. Positions change from year to year, affected primarily by swings in GDP, but one reliable constant is that the former British colonies, Canada and Australia, are among the top five, often as number 2 and 3 respectively.¹

Quite why this should be so provokes some interesting questions. Both countries outperform France, Germany and Britain. Together with the United States, Japan and New Zealand, they are the only non-European countries in the top twenty. If one were to throw in a few other comparative statistics – on crime, violence, individual freedoms, a humane code of justice – Canada and Australia would be even more firmly entrenched in leading places, and the United States, currently at number 6, relegated somewhat lower. What is more, Australia’s upward movement has been steady. Since 1975 it has overtaken eight other countries that then ranked higher (and one of these was New Zealand!). Statistics afford amusement to statisticians, but are uncertain guides to making decisions. Who, for example would prefer to live in Iceland (number 7) than Greece (number 24)? With Australia’s range of climate, its excellent wines and food (pity about the beer), it would not be too difficult to dislodge Canada and Norway and to place a triumphant Australia as the most desirable country in the world in which to live; and one would not be very wrong in so doing.

One of the aims of this book is to trace the process and explain the reasons for Australia’s success and its emergence as an exemplar of what might be called Western, or liberal democratic values. (I own to some reservations as to the specificity of this description; I have observed, in the course of writing their histories, that such things as a rule of law, free media, personal security, the ability to express peaceful dissent and to participate in the processes of government are quite as much valued in Hong Kong or South Africa as in any Western democracy. It is usually unpleasantly authoritarian governments who appeal to ‘Asian’ or ‘African’ values to excuse their denial of freedoms.) One particularly striking characteristic of Australian history is the speed of development. French and British societies in North America can trace their origins to the sixteenth century, but the British occupation of Australia took place two centuries later. For the first generation the settlements in New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land were unequivocal penal colonies, with representative civil institutions dating only from the 1820s, yet a mere thirty years later those colonies were self-governing societies where democratic constitutions were well in advance of those in Britain. Transported convicts, their sentences served, sat in the new Legislative Assemblies, elected by manhood suffrage, including those of two more colonies, Victoria and South Australia which in 1820 had barely been glanced at and where no settlement had been attempted – and two more, Western Australia and Queensland, waited in the wings.

By the end of the century colonial statesmen, many of them Australian-born, were designing a constitution for a continental nation, which was duly inaugurated in January 1901, under the beneficent, if by then somewhat bewildered aegis of old Queen Victoria, who had been born in those earliest days, when New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land were still penal colonies controlled by Governors with autocratic powers.

Moreover, the famous fight at the Eureka stockade aside, all had been done by argument, election and compromise. There had been no liberation struggle, no revolutionary dissenters, no painful wrench from the mother country, and government had succeeded government, often with alarming rapidity, but always following the results of elections which were free, fair and unprecedentedly democratic.

Although it would be extremely difficult to find a parallel for such success, one group of Australians had little reason to celebrate the foundation of a new nation and a new century. The original inhabitants, the Aborigines, had been allowed only limited participation in political life. Indeed, at the time, it was widely assumed that they represented nothing more than the dying remnants of a race and of a culture, of little value in the brisk modern world of 1901.

More recently, heated debate has erupted over the extent to which blame should be allocated for what might be described as attempted genocide, as historians dispute the statistics of frontier violence and dispossession.² Impatience, insensibility, greed and cruelty certainly went hand in hand with some restrained goodwill and acceptance of responsibility, but the outcome was probably inevitable. The British had for long been distinguished global expansionists, establishing both informal and official influence in and over a substantial part of the world’s people. For quite a brief period – to attempt a definition between the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815 and the upsurge of American imperialism with the assault on the Spanish empire in 1898 – Britain also occupied a unique position. Not only was it an intellectual and technological powerhouse, but it was the only country capable of insisting on fulfilling a world role.

The words have to be chosen carefully, for Victorian Britain, with a relatively small army, and that more than fully occupied with India and its neighbours, was by no means a world power, or even less the world power, as is twenty-first-century America. It was rather that control of the seas and of a good deal of the world’s resources, with the City of London its unquestioned financial centre, gave the British the habit of thinking and acting on a world stage which the United States has still to develop. In the process, the British developed an uncommonly good conceit of themselves, which subsequent encounters with reality have still not entirely dispelled.

The first Australians were poorly equipped to face the intrusion of so confident and well-equipped a people. Aboriginal societies were fragmented, lacking the numbers and cohesion to mount a sustained resistance, as did the Maori in neighbouring New Zealand, or indeed the offshore islanders in the Timor Sea. During their long near-isolation – 10,000–12,000 years since the inundation of the land bridges which joined the land mass to the neighbouring islands, and much longer since the original migration perhaps 50,000 years ago – Australians, other than those living on the north coast, had little or no contact with other societies’ ideas or technologies. Other groups – Inuit, South African Bushmen, Amazonian Indians among many – had developed a similar understanding of their environment, and were able to exercise a degree of control over the most unpromising circumstances, but few had done it in such isolation. A fully developed belief system sanctified Aboriginal Australian relationships and satisfied emotional needs, but was wholly unequipped to cope with intrusion and innovation. The arrival of even a small number of representatives of the most advanced and active of societies, accompanied as they were by rum, tobacco and all manner of new diseases, was, with the best will in the world, certain gravely to damage Aboriginal societies; and good will was relatively quickly expended. But the most serious criticism is that during more than a century of Australian self-government most Aborigines were simply not acknowledged as members of society, equal partners in the nation, and suffered accordingly.

In the absence of written records, and given the disparate opinions of archaeologists, so often contentious and variable as new evidence emerges, Aboriginal history before the British occupation must be largely conjectural. The task is made more difficult by modish theorists who claim that any descriptions of autochthonous Australians should only be attempted by their descendants – a rapidly increasing group, if official statistics can be trusted. Some attempt has even been made to restrict the circulation of researches on Aboriginal cultures, although such obscurantism is usually deplored by librarians.³ Since the process by which Aboriginal societies have been shattered, or absorbed, or survived, forms an important part of Australian history and remains a subject of often indignant dispute such sensibilities are here discounted.

If the first colonial century had seen rapid movement, political and social development in the second, following Federation, was more measured. The social compact that accompanied Federation, and which in some measure still survives, continued well into the second half of the twentieth century; during most of this period both Australia and New Zealand shared British values without much question. The King Emperor Edward VII and his successors were accepted as heads of an Australian state, and in each war or international crisis Australia hurried to support Britain. All this changed as for the first time, in 1941, world war came to the Pacific, which for so long had deserved its name. Australia became a front-line combatant, with the assumed protection of an Imperial Britain snatched away by a successful Japanese initiative, to be replaced by a worried and one-sided alliance with the United States. Any future conflict was as likely to take place in the Pacific area as in any other part of the globe, and Australia’s participation would be almost certain, as wars in Korea and Vietnam both proved.

Post-war Australians reacted to changed circumstances as new realism forced painful alterations to the old Federation concordat. Immigrants, who (except for those from Britain) had been severely restricted, were encouraged, at first as long as they were suitably pigmented, but later with increasing tolerance shown for Asians, if qualified and prosperous. Government control over labour, ensured by wage controls and arbitration, was relaxed, and the Australian dollar exposed to foreign exchange markets. With the British unilateral declaration of independence symbolized by its entry into the European Community, new markets had to be sought in Asia for Australian products: and it was to be on agriculture and minerals rather than a developed manufacturing industry that Australian prosperity depended.

One aspect of Australia’s success evidently lies in the great expanse of rich agricultural land producing an astonishing range of food and drink, from Queensland’s mangoes and coffee to Tasmanian cheese and apples, and some of the world’s best wines; while wool, the foundation of nineteenth-century prosperity, remains a major export, Australia being by far the world’s largest producer. Mineral resources seem inexhaustible, Australia ranking among the world’s most prolific producers of iron ore, coal, copper, gold, silver, lead, zinc, nickel, aluminium, magnesium and uranium, with access to the potentially rich Timor Sea oilfields and Western Australian natural gas.

But, as the example of such countries as Brazil indicates, bountiful natural resources do not alone ensure stable prosperity. Australian fidelity to parliamentary democracy has been an essential factor; for a century and a half statues of Queen Victoria have looked down benignly on a succession of state and Federal governments, brought to power by democratic election. Indeed, it might be thought that the country is surfeited with democracy, with compulsory voting, often of fiendish complexity, in a proliferation of state and commonwealth elections at unsettlingly frequent intervals, combined with a popular conception, by no means unfounded, that many politicians have their own welfare primarily at heart.

If Australia has made an outstandingly successful adjustment to post-war problems, another question is presented. Do Australians themselves fully appreciate the magnitude of their achievements? Given the ebullient self-confidence of a test match crowd this may sound absurd, but self-doubt is evident in many aspects of society. The magnificent new Melbourne Museum, a monument to fashionable socio-political concepts, provides no indication of the Colony of Victoria’s progress from 1834, when a police magistrate, a file of soldiers and a few convicts were sent from Sydney to keep an eye on the handful of Tasmanians who had brought their families and sheep to the south coast, to 1857, when the first democratically elected Victorian Legislative Assembly met in the thriving city of Melbourne.⁴ It is true that there are less pleasant aspects of Australian society: one of the world’s highest rates on clinical depression; the highest expenditure on gambling; the highest proportion of serious assaults; persistent examples of petty corruption; the harsh treatment of illegal immigrants and the miserable condition of some Aborigines. No country is without reproach, many much more serious, but it seems that Australian opinion-formers are reluctant to accept that they live in what is indeed a lucky country with an exceptional record of achievement.⁵

Part of Australian unease is due to a sense of isolation. Among Australia’s neighbours stable democracy is an exotic plant. At best, relations have been mutually wary, and at worst openly hostile; since the end of the Second World War Australian troops have been engaged in Korea, Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaya, Timor, Kuwait and Iraq, often indeed in defence of established governments, and as part of an alliance with Britain or the United States. Such interventions have often been opposed, sometimes vigorously, and to many Asians Australia appears as an integral part of American imperialism, an impression recently reinforced by the government’s enthusiasm for a conflict with Iraq, a country totally outside any Australian sphere of interest. On the other hand, the aftermath of the terrorist bombing in Bali in October 2002 has brought Australia and Indonesia closer together, and relations with China have developed smoothly.

To a very great extent this impression reflects reality. Australian values – a passion for fair play, plain speaking, equal opportunities – are those of both Britain and the United States; a total lack of deference and a happy hedonism respectively differentiate Australia from the other two. Australia is, too, more homogenous than the United States, still predominantly Anglo-Celtic in spite of European and Asian post-war immigration; and Americans do not take much interest in those antipodean passions, cricket and the three forms of rugby football.⁶ Half a world away from its natural friends, and allies, with only New Zealand in support, Australia is uncomfortably placed geographically. With New Zealand, Japan and the United States, perhaps to be joined by Russia and the western Latin American states, Australia is best defined as a Pacific rather than an Asian power.

The sense of isolation, albeit now diminishing as communications have improved, has driven Australians abroad in an influential diaspora. Rupert Murdoch’s position as the most powerful figure in the world’s media owes something to his very Australian ability to operate in both America and Britain, to say nothing of such countries as China. Australians, particularly young Australians, are internationalists, finding it much easier than Americans or even Britons to become citizens of the world, self-confident, sure of making themselves comfortable wherever they are. And doing so especially in the arts, with a specifically Australasian style, spontaneous and relaxed, more ironic and tangential than the American model, expressed with the help of a vigorous vocabulary and exemplified by outstanding talents such as those of Cate Blanchett, Nicole Kidman, Sam Neill, Geoffrey Rush, Russell Crowe, Naomi Watts, Peter Weir, Peter Jackson and the incomparable Barry Humphries.

Thirty years and more ago, on my first flight to Australia, I talked to a Queen’s Messenger, one of that very select band of former officers, wearing a silver greyhound badge, charged to carry the most sensitive documents to foreign parts. He defined himself as an Australian Briton, from a family living in Australia for a number of generations, but firmly British. Today, I suspect, this would not be so. After Britain’s entry into the European Community, the old Imperial ties have been loosened, although Britain still contributes the largest proportion of immigrants, and many Britons have Australian kin. Americans, on the other hand, rarely visit and almost never emigrate; awareness of Australia is, apart from that engendered by Crocodile Dundee, unusual. Bill Bryson revealed the paucity of reporting in Australia in the New York Times, compared, for example, with that of Peru – 20 Australian articles in 1997 as opposed to 120 – ‘about level with Belarus and Burundi’.⁷

Available histories are not too helpful in explaining Australia to the world: although Australian history is a thriving subject in Australia, with many excellent works published each year (to which this book owes much), they are almost all written from an Australian point of view by resident historians, and rarely place Australia clearly in the world context; such critical events as the 1850 British Whig government’s decision to allow the colonies to devise their own forms of government, or the American expansion in the Pacific, are not allotted their real importance. The one widely read work, Robert Hughes’s The Fatal Shore, brilliantly written and well documented, concerns itself only with the convict story and therefore presents a partial view of true developments; and the frequent popular returns to the Ned Kelly story, which invariably present that murderous horse-thief as an exemplar of romantic heroism, do little to illuminate the truth of Australian history.

This book is therefore primarily an attempt to explain to the rest of the world how this remarkable society has evolved, a continental nation.

The opportunity of a second edition has been taken to extend the history past the 2004 election. I much regret that time has not allowed me to include some of the excellent new works that have appeared in the last year. Australian history is a flourishing subject.

1

Terra Australis Nondum Cognita

Terra Nullius?

The future of the world should have been decided at a meeting on 7 June 1494 between representatives of King João II of Portugal and King Ferdinand of Aragon and Castile. Alternately bribed by Ferdinand – the Borgia pope was a devoted family man, and his children Lucrezia and Cesare had expensive tastes – and threatened by João, Pope Alexander VI had decided that those parts of the world still to be discovered were to be shared between the two Iberian kingdoms. By the Treaty of Tordesillas, confirmed by a papal Bull, all lands as yet unknown west of a line drawn 370 leagues (about 1,175 miles) from the Cape Verde islands were to be Spanish, those to the east Portuguese.¹

It was Cristoforo Colombo’s accidental encounter with the American continent that precipitated the argument. Before Colombo’s expedition, financed by Spain, the Portuguese had been the leaders in exploration. Initially encouraged by Dom Henrique, Iffante of Portugal (grandson of King Edward III of England and known to the English as Prince Henry the Navigator), Portuguese sailors had been nosing their way down the west coast of Africa and out into the Atlantic since the early years of the century. The Canary Islands and the Azores had already been discovered – in the sense of being shown on charts, although Arab geographers had earlier at least known of their existence – by about 1350, but the first Portuguese expedition was to Madeira, in 1420. Five years later the port of Ceuta, on the African coast opposite Gibraltar, was captured by the Portuguese. Gibraltar remained in Muslim hands, but the Moorish hold on southern Spain was slipping, and by the end of the century the passage from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic would be in Christian control. This was of particular importance, since the rapid expansion of Turkish power threatened to interrupt land communications with the East. Only Constantinople itself was holding out, and that precariously. Even if the Turkish empire allowed the precious spices and silks from India and China to pass through to Western Europe, high duties were likely to be added to the already expensive costs of caravan transport. Since a small Portuguese caravel with a twenty-man crew could carry the loads of a thousand camels, a sea route to Asia was an objective worth much effort.

Bartolomeu Dias was able to report the first stage towards this goal in 1488, after he had rounded the Cape of Good Hope and thereby proved the existence of a possible passage to India. He was followed by Vasco da Gama, who in May 1498 sailed past the Cape into the Indian Ocean to land on the coast of India, thus succeeding where Colombo had failed and opening up the Orient to Portuguese commerce.

Spain and Portugal were at that time the only maritime powers to have demonstrated a persistent interest in exploration. King Henry VII of England had defied the papal edict, but the English voyages to Newfoundland between 1498 and 1506 were not followed up by King Henry VIII, who had pressing concerns of a different nature. The Treaty of Tordesillas was therefore reasonable enough, and its effects have, in part, endured. Brazil, undiscovered at the time of the treaty, remains Portuguese-speaking, the rest of South America Hispanophone (and much of North America as well); relics of the Portuguese empire persisted until recently in Angola, Mozambique, Macao and Timor. One substantial part of the regions allotted by the Pope however, remained, undiscovered and unclaimed.

For many hundreds of years the existence of a great southern continent was acknowledged by European geographers to be at least possible, even if nothing whatsoever was known of it. It was only reasonable, they argued, that the great land masses of the northern hemisphere (medieval scholars were rarely flat-earthers) should be balanced by a southern equivalent. Indeed, argued the great sixteenth-century cartographer Mercator, were there to be no compensating southern land mass, the world would surely fall to destruction among the stars.² ‘Terra Australis Incognita’ or ‘Nondum cognita’ – the unknown southern land – therefore appeared on European maps as an amorphous mass on the edge of the southern seas. Imperial China, convinced that its own land was the centre of the world, evinced only modest interest in distant regions, but accepted a regular supply of dried sea slugs (Holothurius edulis, the constituent of a glutinous soup much esteemed – by Chinese) from the northern coasts of Terra Australis. Professor Joseph Needham, the great authority on Chinese history, believes that Chinese visitors came there in the fifteenth century, when the last of great Chinese voyages of exploration, under the eunuch admiral Cheng Ho, quartered the Indian Ocean; the evidence, however, is fragmentary.³ The fact that Marco Polo⁴ refers to a ‘Great Java’ lying just to the south of ‘Lytil Java’ may suggest that medieval Chinese were aware of the existence of a southern continent, but if so they ignored it.

Authorized by the Treaty of Tordesillas, and with a foothold established by da Gama, Portuguese adventurers and missionaries streamed across the Indian Ocean; Goa fell to Alonso d’Albuquerque in 1510, Malacca, the key to the South China Sea, and the Moluccas, the Spice Islands (whence came such immensely valuable culinary spices as peppers and nutmegs), were discovered in the following year by Francisco Señao. By 1515 a Portuguese fort protected the settlement at Colombo in Ceylon. St Francis Xavier landed in Japan in 1547, and in 1557 the port of Macao was granted by the Chinese emperor as a Portuguese trading post. In this way a chain of safe havens was available to Portuguese sailors, from the coast of Brazil to the furthest Indies.

Another agreement with Spain was needed to settle the line of demarcation in the east to match that in the west agreed at Tordesillas, and a conference was accordingly held on the border of the two countries between Badajoz and Elvas, this time without papal assistance, and with the geographical facts still imperfectly understood. It was left to both sides to agree on a boundary, which was fixed by Portugal considerably further to the west, at 51 degrees, marked by the mouth of the Waipoco River. If this line were to be extended round the globe to 129 degrees east, all the interesting regions, including China, India and the Spice Islands would go to Portugal, leaving Spain with most of New Guinea, a deeply unattractive spot, and a scatter of Pacific islands as yet unknown. Such an outcome was totally unacceptable to the ambitious young emperor, Charles V, who had inherited, along with his imperial title, a good deal of Germany, Spain, Burgundy, Flanders, Naples and all Spanish America. The ensuing conflict left Portugal with all her eastern rights intact, with the exception of the Philippines, acknowledged to be Spanish.

That unknown continent south of Java, divided as it is by 129 degrees east, would, when anyone chanced upon it, therefore be claimed both by Portugal and by Spain. For the moment, however, that was unlikely. Both Spaniards and Portuguese were operating around the Equator, and all Portuguese seamen followed the same route, from Lisbon to the Brazilian coast, then slanting across the South Atlantic and the Indian Ocean to their trading posts on the west coast of India (the Portuguese steered clear of the Cape of Good Hope after one viceroy on his way to the Indies was killed by the inhabitants). Once the Spanish were established on the western coast of South America, communications with the Philippines led to the first explorations of the Pacific, and in 1528 Alvaro de Saavedra sailed along the north coast of the great island later named Nueva Guinea by Inigo Ortez. This had, however, already been sighted by the Portuguese Jorge de Meneses and named Os Papuas, ‘frizzle-haired’, apparently a term used by the Moluccan traders to describe the inhabitants. If Portuguese or Spanish explorers went far enough south to encounter Terra Australis,⁵ they left no record of their landings, other than information which found its way on to a number of sixteenth-century French maps; the argument on the subject continues.

The Pope’s original adjudication did not survive unchallenged, as the newly independent and fiercely Protestant United Provinces of the Netherlands paid it no attention. The Dutch had been fighting for freedom from Spanish rule since the 1570s and considered that the world’s trade belonged to those powers strong enough to take it. From the end of the sixteenth century Dutch adventurers started to displace the Portuguese who were already settled in Asia. Portugal was in no position to offer too much resistance, since it had been annexed to the Spanish crown in 1580, and Spain was fully occupied in trying to protect its extensive interests in the Americas. The Dutch effort, originally incoherent and economically uncompetitive – no fewer than sixty-five ships left Holland for the Indies in 1601 – was organized the next year by the formation of a chartered monopoly, the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, commonly known as the VOC – the United East India Company – tightly controlled by a board of directors, the Heeren XVII in Amsterdam. The next few years saw VOC trading posts established over nearly 1,500 miles of the Java Sea, from Bantam on the island of Java to the islands of Amboina and Banda off the western coast of New Guinea, which marked the most southerly point of European exploration. By the end of the century descriptions of the undiscovered continent began filtering through. ‘The south land’, the Dutch geographer Cornelius Wytfliet reported, ‘extends immediately towards the Polar circle, but also towards the countries of the East – separated by a narrow strait it lies in front of New Guinea, but has been explored only at a few coastal places.’ That was published in 1597, presumably from accounts of previous voyages.⁶

The VOC wasted no time in exploring their newly acquired territory. In 1605 the Governor of Amboina, Cornelis de Houtman, despatched a small ship, the Duyfken, under the command of Willem Janszoon, to have a closer look at the south coast of New Guinea. What he found was hardly encouraging, since half his crew were murdered by ‘the very barbarous’ natives, and he found white people, presumably Portuguese, established on the southern shores. Steering away to the south, Janszoon encountered hitherto uncharted land, which he assumed to be part of New Guinea. It was in fact the western shore of the Cape York peninsula on the Australian mainland, which Janzsoon then followed for some 200 miles (his furthest point is still known as Cape Keerweer – ‘Turnabout’). The first encounter between Europeans and Australians was not propitious. One of the Duyfken’s crew was killed, and Janszoon returned to port, having found ‘no good to be done there’. An interesting example of the international nature of the eastern trade was the fact that Janszoon’s return was related by the Tamil master of a Banda ship to the English East India Company’s agent at Bantam, John Saris.⁷

The Duyfken’s voyage, otherwise fruitless, at least enabled the VOC to fend off the incursions of a prospective competitor, the Dutch Australia Company, by citing Janszoon’s journals as proof of their own efforts at exploration, but subsequent attempts to find something useful in Terra Australis were no more encouraging. The ruthless expansionism of Jan Pieterszoon Coen, from 1619 the first Governor General of the VOC’s eastern possessions, with his headquarters at the new port of Batavia, led to another expedition in 1623, hoping to discover a passage between Cape York and New Guinea that would lead into the Pacific, thus avoiding the Spanish in the Philippines (the fact that Luis Vaez de Torres had actually found a passage – the Torres Strait – at the same time that Janszoon was ‘discovering’ Australia had prudently been kept secret by the Spaniards). Captain Jan Carstenszoon, commanding the Arnhem and Pera, failed to find the straits, but did succeed in charting more of the coastline, extending Janszoon’s exploration of the Cape York peninsula and cutting north-west across the Gulf of Carpentaria to the tip of what is now called, in recognition of his discovery, Arnhem Land. Foiled by shallows and strong easterly winds from penetrating the straits, Carstenszoon presumed that the land he sighted intermittently was all a continuation of the New Guinea coastline, but he noticed a striking difference between the inhabitants of New Guinea itself and the Torres Strait Islands and those of what was in fact the Australian mainland. The former were bold and aggressive, cannibals wearing strings of human teeth around their necks, with fearsome swordfish teeth thrust through their noses, manning large canoes, whilst the Cape York men were ‘less cunning, bold and evil natured’, carrying ‘weapons less deadly than those we have seen used by other blacks’, mingling unconcernedly with the sailors, and having one of their number kidnapped as a result. Once more the reports sent to headquarters were gloomy. There was no sign of spices or gold, indeed ‘We have not seen one fruit-bearing tree, nor anything that man could make use of; there are no mountains or even hills… this is the most arid and barren region that could be found anywhere on the earth; the inhabitants, too, are the most wretched and poorest creatures that I have seen.’ The best that could be said was that Cape York possessed some land ‘with good soils for planting and sowing but, so far as we could observe, utterly destitute of fresh water’.⁸