Recent evidence
seeming to support a European discovery of
Australia by
the Portuguese, not Britain’s Captain James Cook, has
proved not to
be so. Historian Greg Jeffreys now agrees that parts of
the wreckage
found on a beach on Fraser Island, off the Queensland
coast, are not
cannons from a seventeenth-century Portuguese ship,
as fi rst
thought, but hoisting gear from a vessel that sailed our shores
some 200 years
later. The identity of the relics became clear after they
were cleaned
with high-pressure hoses. Discussion about who really
discovered
Australia still persists, though. Some continue to suggest
that the wreck
of the sixteenth-century ‘Mahogany ship’ found in sand
hills near
Warrnambool in Victoria is a Portuguese boat.
Those who
believe the credit for our land’s ‘discovery’ should go to
the Portuguese
point to the existence of the Dieppe maps (drawn
between 1536
and 1550), which may possibly depict Australia. Once,
it seems, some
people, including the explorer Matthew Flinders,
did consider
these maps were evidence of a Portuguese discovery.
The Portuguese
had established a presence in Timor in 1516, and
Portuguese
explorers such as Luis Vaz de Torres (who sailed through
the Torres
Strait in the early seventeenth century) were active in
the region long
before Cook’s voyage. However, what Portuguese
records have
been so far found from this time make no mention of
any discovery
of a ‘great south land’. History still guards its secrets.
