The First “Australia” Wasn’t Here
For a country with such a straightforward-sounding name, Australia took a remarkably roundabout route to getting it.
It starts with the wind. The Latin auster meant the south wind, and from it came australis, southern. Long before any European had sailed anywhere near here, classical geographers argued that there must be a great landmass in the south to balance all the land in the north, otherwise, presumably, the world would tip over. Mapmakers dutifully drew it in for centuries as Terra Australis Incognita, the unknown southern land, sketching coastlines with great confidence for a place nobody had seen.
The first person to give a real place a name like “Australia” was the Portuguese navigator Pedro Fernandes de Queirós, sailing for Spain. In 1606 he reached an island he believed was the great southern continent and called it Austrialia del Espíritu Santo. The extra i wasn’t a typo. It was a pun, a nod to the southern land and to the Habsburg king of Spain, whose family came from Austria. It was not, sadly for Queirós, the southern continent. It was an island in what is now Vanuatu, and it’s still called Espiritu Santo today.
The same year, the Dutch navigator Willem Janszoon became the first known European to reach the actual continent, landing on the western side of Cape York Peninsula. Over the following decades the Dutch charted much of the north and west coasts, and in 1644 Abel Tasman named it Nieuw Holland, New Holland, a name that stuck on European maps for well over a century.
When James Cook reached the east coast in 1770, he named his stretch New South Wales and claimed it for Britain, which meant the continent now had a Dutch name for one side and a British name for the other, like a house with two different numbers on the front door.
The man who tidied this up was Matthew Flinders, who sailed right around the continent between 1801 and 1803 and proved it was one landmass. In his account of the voyage, published in 1814, he said he would have preferred to call it Australia, as more agreeable to the ear. The Governor of New South Wales, Lachlan Macquarie, liked the idea and began using “Australia” in official correspondence, recommending it be formally adopted. It was widely used by the 1820s, and when six colonies federated in 1901, the new nation took the name with it.
What strikes me, as someone who works with language, is that every one of those names says more about the namers than the place. A Greek theory about balance. A Spanish king’s family tree. A Dutch homesick for home. A British county. A navigator who thought it sounded nicer.
And the oldest names of all aren’t on that list. Before any of this, the continent was home to hundreds of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander nations, speaking more than 250 languages, with names for country that described rivers, ranges, ancestors and stories, rather than a single label for the whole. “Australia” is one name, and a fairly recent one.
It’s not a bad one. It’s short, easy to say and, as Flinders noted, pleasant on the ear. Just remember that it began as a guess about a land nobody had seen, was first used for an island somewhere else, and arrived here via a pun.
