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Image courtesy of publisher's website.
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'First published in two-volumes in 1814, this is the enthralling account of the circumnavigation of Australia, by the man who gave our country its name.
'Edited and introduced by Tim Flannery, Terra Australis is a vital step toward a new understanding of our own history. Flinders tells of meeting and communicating with Aborigines, of the scrub and wilderness. His descriptions of the difficulties that he and his sailors faced still bristle with energy and immediacy two hundred years later. This is Flinders’ story in his own words, neglected until now, but destined to be eagerly read by all ages.' (Publication summary : Text Classics)
19th-Century Australian Travel Writing
Matthew Flinders (1774-1814), navigator, hydrographer and scientist, published his travel narratives in 1814. The preface noted that the delay of 11 years between his travels in Terra Australis (1801, 1802, 1803) and the publication was a consequence of the shipwreck of The Porpoise, and his six-and-a-half-year imprisonment in Mauritius. This work was more of an exploration narrative, rather than simply a travel narrative, and contains detailed nautical and navigational coordinates. Flinders stated that the work was not a polished document, and that its value lay in the matter that it contains rather than the manner in which it was written. The work was established through an account of earlier explorations, and is a detailed narrative of Flinders' adventures over sea to Australia.
'Australia’s national anthem begins, ‘Australians all let us rejoice,/ for we are one and free’. Few now reflect on the Enlightenment presumption of a racial ‘oneness’ that led to the first colonial naming of the people inhabiting this land, the ‘Australians’. That the name was given to the land’s first inhabitants, and not its recently arrived colonists, now seems an unspoken irony. For contemporary Australians, the very name stands as a symbol of colonial appropriation. In Australia’s name lies a perennial legacy of race, colonisation and Europe’s Enlightenment.' (Introduction)
'Matthew Flinders’s major work, A Voyage to Terra Australis: Undertaken for the Purpose of Completing the Discovery of that Vast Country, and Prosecuted in the Years 1801, 1802, and 1803, in His Majesty’s Ship the Investigator, appeared in 1814, eleven years after the voyage it describes finished, and just days before he died. Although it has now become a canonical work in Australian history and a copy of the first edition is a highly-prized and expensive investment, at the time it was published it did not sell well. 1 The moment had passed—during the intervening decade Napoleon had crowned himself Emperor and made a battleground of the whole of Europe, and the distant activities of a surveying expedition must have seemed irrelevant to many who had been confronted with these more urgent and proximate events. As Ingleton points out, in respect of Flinders’s prospects of promotion or financial support while writing the Voyage, “the war had been long and relentless, and promotion came when vacancies occurred.… Possibly the lords commissioners of the Admiralty were beginning to consider that Flinders had been rewarded sufficiently for the explorations and surveys he had made so long ago.' (Introduction)
'Matthew Flinders’s major work, A Voyage to Terra Australis: Undertaken for the Purpose of Completing the Discovery of that Vast Country, and Prosecuted in the Years 1801, 1802, and 1803, in His Majesty’s Ship the Investigator, appeared in 1814, eleven years after the voyage it describes finished, and just days before he died. Although it has now become a canonical work in Australian history and a copy of the first edition is a highly-prized and expensive investment, at the time it was published it did not sell well. 1 The moment had passed—during the intervening decade Napoleon had crowned himself Emperor and made a battleground of the whole of Europe, and the distant activities of a surveying expedition must have seemed irrelevant to many who had been confronted with these more urgent and proximate events. As Ingleton points out, in respect of Flinders’s prospects of promotion or financial support while writing the Voyage, “the war had been long and relentless, and promotion came when vacancies occurred.… Possibly the lords commissioners of the Admiralty were beginning to consider that Flinders had been rewarded sufficiently for the explorations and surveys he had made so long ago.' (Introduction)
'Australia’s national anthem begins, ‘Australians all let us rejoice,/ for we are one and free’. Few now reflect on the Enlightenment presumption of a racial ‘oneness’ that led to the first colonial naming of the people inhabiting this land, the ‘Australians’. That the name was given to the land’s first inhabitants, and not its recently arrived colonists, now seems an unspoken irony. For contemporary Australians, the very name stands as a symbol of colonial appropriation. In Australia’s name lies a perennial legacy of race, colonisation and Europe’s Enlightenment.' (Introduction)
