Early encounters

ALTHOUGH HOME TO First Nations people for tens of thousands of years, Australia has a relatively recent history of non-Indigenous contact that is commonly misconstrued. Research in 2019 by the now-defunct federal Department of Communications and the Arts reveals that about one-third of Australians mistakenly believe Lieutenant James Cook was the first European to sight the continent we now know as Australia. Among the other two-thirds, it’s generally accepted that Cook’s 1770 voyage was preceded by dozens of encounters in the continent’s north-west, west and south throughout the 17th century – many of which occurred more than a century before Cook set sail aboard HMB Endeavour.

Dutchman Willem Janszoon is credited with having made the first authenticated sighting of Australia by a European: he and his crew aboard Duyfken reached the western coast of Cape York Peninsula in far north Queensland in 1606. What’s less well known is there’s a long line of maritime explorers who arrived here before Janszoon. Numerous theories claim that before those 17th-century arrivals, many outsiders, from at least Spain, Portugal, China and Indonesia, had already reached the shores of the vast southern continent.

EARLY WORLD MAPS show a large single landmass at the bottom of the Southern Hemisphere. Since antiquity, this hypothetical continent that would later be known