• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

The Institute of Australian Culture

Heritage, history, and heroes; literature, legends, and larrikins

  • Home
  • Articles
  • Biographies
  • Books
  • Ephemera
  • Poetry & songs
    • Recommended poetry
    • Poetry and songs, 1786-1900
    • Poetry and songs, 1901-1954
    • Rock music and pop music [videos]
    • Early music [videos]
  • Slang
  • Timeline
    • Timeline of Australian history and culture
    • Calendar of Australian history and culture
    • Significant events and commemorative dates
  • Topics

Section 1 [From Phillip to McKell, by Rex Ingamells]

27 November 2016 · Leave a Comment

[Editor: This is section 1 of From Phillip to McKell: The Story of Australia (1949) by Rex Ingamells.]

Europe comes to Australia

Spanish and Portuguese sailors pioneered Europe’s oceanic trade with the Philippines and the Spice Islands, the Spaniards sailing from the Pacific coast of the Americas, the Portuguese skirting the Cape of Good Hope. Old maps suggest that forgotten ships and captains visited Australia’s eastern and western shores in the first half of the Sixteenth Century. We know that Saavedra reached the North New Guinea coast in 1526, and Torres, in 1606, sailed between Cape York and New Guinea, without, it is thought, sighting Cape York. In 1606 occurred the first recorded contact of a ship with the Australian coast, when a Dutch vessel, the Duyfken, sailed along the western side of Cape York Peninsula. By this time, the Iberian Catholic monopoly of New World trade had been destroyed by the Protestant Dutch and English.

From 1613, the Dutch East India Company’s Java-bound ships abandoned the traditional north-east route from the Cape of Good Hope, and saved time by going due east with the prevailing winds and then north. Discovery of the West Australian coastline became inevitable. Bit by bit, it was unveiled by Dutch captains, but to all of them it appeared unfriendly, and it acquired a gloomy and tragic record, in which the Pelsart story was but one episode. New Holland, as the country came to be called, offered no trade prospects, and, when Governor Van Diemen sent Abel Jansz Tasman on a voyage of discovery from Batavia, in 1642, that navigator sailed wide of the known coast, circling the continent without seeing it; but he discovered and named Van Diemen’s Land.

The first lively interest shown in New Holland came from the scientific outlook brought to oceanic discovery by the English. William Dampier, adventurer though he was, had that honest curiosity which marks the progressive scientist. The Journal of his stay on the coast with pirate companions, near Melville Island, in 1688, presents a forbidding picture; but it aroused English interest, and hopes of fruitful discoveries elsewhere on the coast. Dampier’s second voyage, however, made a decade later, brought him only upon barren shores already known to the Dutch, and English interest in New Holland flagged until, in 1770, Lieutenant James Cook, in the Endeavour Bark, charted the fertile eastern coast from Point Hicks to the extreme north, calling the eastern section of the continent New South Wales.

England, victorious over France in India and North America, was now to forestall any ambitions the French may have entertained for securing precedence in colonial enterprise in the Pacific. It was not desire for trade which brought Captain Arthur Phillip, with a community of about 1000 persons, to New South Wales in 1788. Government, since the American Colonies had recently fought their way out of the Empire, was at its wits’ end concerning a surplus prison population in England. Convicts who earlier would have gone to America were, following a spate of discussions on colonial projects, sent to Botany Bay.

Judging Botany Bay an unsuitable site, Phillip found a better one in the marvellous harbour which had escaped Cook’s notice, and commanded his community to land at Sydney Cove.

While the First Fleet lay at anchor in Botany Bay, two ill-fated French vessels, under the Comte de Laperouse, appeared. Some years later, Flinders was to find two other French ships, under Nicholas Baudin, at Encounter Bay. Despite apprehensions, recurrent for some decades, that the French would try to settle in Australia, they never did. Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, English, French . . . it was the English who colonized Australia.



Source:
Rex Ingamells, From Phillip to McKell: The Story of Australia, Jindyworobak Publications: Melbourne, 1949, [pages 11-14]

Editor’s notes:
Batavia = the former name of Jakarta (Indonesia) when it was governed by the Dutch

Filed Under: chapters Tagged With: chapter, From Phillip to McKell (Rex Ingamells 1949), Rex Ingamells (1913-1955) (author), SourceIACLibrary, year1949

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

Australian flag, Kangaroo, Wattle, 100hThe Institute of Australian Culture
Heritage, history, and heroes. Literature, legends, and larrikins. Stories, songs, and sages.

Search this site

Featured books

The Man from Snowy River and Other Verses, by Banjo Paterson A Book for Kids, by C. J. Dennis  The Bulletin Reciter: A Collection of Verses for Recitation from The Bulletin The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke, by C. J. Dennis The Complete Inner History of the Kelly Gang and Their Pursuers, by J. J. Kenneally The Foundations of Culture in Australia, by P. R. Stephensen The Australian Crisis, by C. H. Kirmess Such Is Life, by Joseph Furphy
More books (full text)

Featured lists

Timeline of Australian history and culture
A list of significant Australiana
Significant events and commemorative dates
Australian slang
Books (full text)
Australian literature
Rock music and pop music (videos)
Folk music and bush music (videos)
Early music (videos)
Recommended poetry
Poetry and songs, 1786-1900
Poetry and songs, 1901-1954
Australian explorers
Topics
Links

Featured posts

Advance Australia Fair: How the song became the Australian national anthem
Brian Cadd [music videos and biography]
Ned Kelly: Australian bushranger
Under the Southern Cross I Stand [the Australian cricket team’s victory song]

Some Australian authors

E. J. Brady
John Le Gay Brereton
C. J. Dennis
Mary Hannay Foott
Joseph Furphy
Mary Gilmore
Charles Harpur
Grant Hervey
Lucy Everett Homfray
Rex Ingamells
Henry Kendall
“Kookaburra”
Henry Lawson
Jack Moses
“Dryblower” Murphy
John Shaw Neilson
John O’Brien (Patrick Joseph Hartigan)
“Banjo” Paterson
Marie E. J. Pitt
A. G. Stephens
P. R. Stephensen
Agnes L. Storrie (Agnes L. Kettlewell)

Recent Posts

  • A billabong: Goulbourn River [postcard, 27 November 1907]
  • Dear Mac [postcard, early 20th Century]
  • The New to the Old [poem by Randolph Bedford, 3 January 1896]
  • New Year greetings [postcard, early 20th Century]
  • New Year greetings [postcard, early 20th Century]

Top Posts & Pages

  • Under the Southern Cross I Stand [the Australian cricket team’s victory song]
  • Australian slang
  • Click Go the Shears [folk music, lyrics; traditional Australian song, 1890s]
  • Timeline of Australian history and culture
  • The Man from Snowy River [poem by Banjo Paterson]

Archives

Categories

Posts of note

The Bastard from the Bush [poem, circa 1900]
A Book for Kids [by C. J. Dennis, 1921]
Click Go the Shears [traditional Australian song, 1890s]
Core of My Heart [“My Country”, poem by Dorothea Mackellar, 24 October 1908]
Freedom on the Wallaby [poem by Henry Lawson, 16 May 1891]
The Man from Ironbark [poem by Banjo Paterson]
Nationality [poem by Mary Gilmore, 12 May 1942]
The Newcastle song [music video, sung by Bob Hudson]
No Foe Shall Gather Our Harvest [poem by Mary Gilmore, 29 June 1940]
Our pipes [short story by Henry Lawson]
Rommel’s comments on Australian soldiers [1941-1942]
Shooting the moon [short story by Henry Lawson]

Recent Comments

  • Annie Crestani on Under the Southern Cross I Stand [the Australian cricket team’s victory song]
  • Peter Pearsall on The Clarence [poem by Jack Moses]
  • Trevor Hurst on Timeline of Australian history and culture
  • Ju on Under the Southern Cross I Stand [the Australian cricket team’s victory song]
  • David Carroll on Queensland [poem by Philip Durham Lorimer]

For Australia

Copyright © 2023 · Log in