Streets, Stations And Ranges Preserve

Flinders’ Name In Terra Australis

Apart from Captain James Cook no navigator was more important to Australia than Captain Matthew Flinders who first circumnavigated the island continent.

HE achievements of Flinders are more extraordinary when viewed linst the frustrations of his per lal life. When he died he was 40 irs old, but seven of those years 1 been spent as a prisoner of the inch at Mauritius and the last four, ill health on miserly Navy half r while he struggled to write the ieral account of the voyage of the estigator and prepare the charts A Voyage to Terra Australis □se profits he did not live to en- Vpart from his spare-time explora i with George Bass in the little n Thumb on the occasion of his t voyage to NSW in 1795, Flin s spent less than two years on his jor survey of the Australian coast HMS Investigator. It is these two rs that are described by K. A. stin in The Voyage of the Investi or. binders was born in Lincolnshire in '4 and was 26, a Lieutenant and I his first voyage to N.S.W. under belt when he enlisted the aid of Joseph Banks in setting up a Irographic and scientific expedition New Holland. )n the strength of his own voyage NSW with Cook, as well as for wealth and position. Banks in ;nce with the Admiralty was very at. He was also scientific adviser the King, honorary Director of Kew Gardens and President of Royal Society. He was, above all :, patron of the arts and sciences I little could be done in these is without his say-so. lis patronage of Flinders was a •-edged sword. Without him Flin s would never have realised his bition; with it he had to endure petty feminine side of Banks’ racter and the exercise of the ver, which Banks enjoyed, binders’ service for his country scant recognition in Britain ing his lifetime, “To most Eng imen,” writes Austin, “Australia » a strange, remote country, of e significance, a convenient dump

ing ground for convicts, and no more. It was left for the future citizens of Australia, not of England, to recognise the full importance of the voyage of the Investigator and to pay to the man who carried it out the honour that was long overdue.”

After self-government came to the several Australian States they vied with one another in acknowledging their debt to Flinders. Monuments to the navigator abound—everywhere from South Australia’s Kangaroo Island to the churchyard of St.

Paul’s cathedral in Melbourne.

Streets in capital and provincial cities, schools, lighthouses, railway stations, electorates, mountain ranges, aircraft, forests, islands, reefs, Victoria’s Naval base all “bear his name and preserve his memory”.

So much is he a national hero that his portrait appears on the Aus tralian 10/- note.—lT.

(The Voyage Of The Invest

IGATOR. Published by Rigby Ltd. 45/-.)