Who Discovered Australia?

Who Discovered Australia? This is the second of four blogs focusing on four topics discussed in my tutorial classes in HT120 (Introduction to Australian History) at Christian Heritage College. So who really discovered Australia? I believe we should first see the definition of ‘discover’. According to the Cambridge Dictionary , discover means ‘to find information, a place, or an object, especially for the first time.’ In short, to discover Australia means that one would have to be the first human to find it in history; we know it wasn’t the British or the Dutch as the Indigenous Australians were already there, so we can cross out that option. Not the Dutch Not the British So then who did? According to  Brian Hooker's studies , the idea of Australia began much earlier than the Dutch and British landings. A Greek astronomer and geographer, Claudius Ptolemy, around the year 150AD, claimed that there had to be a large piece of land below the Indian oc...