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.
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 ocean in order to balance 'the distribution and extent of land and water masses throughout the world.' However, knowing about the possibility of something does not mean that one 'discovered' that something, as is clear by the Cambridge dictionary's definition of the word 'discover.
Other
sources claim that some people migrated from Africa about 60,000 years ago and arrived in Australia around 50,000 years ago; these people are reputed to be the ones who first discovered Australia, and are commonly known as the indigenous Australians/Australian Aboriginals.
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