Who named Australia?

I just had to dig this out of my files, because somebody cited a page that cited Wikipedia, but the material I found there was only a common misconception that Matthew Flinders was the first to use "Australia" in print.

I am putting it here, because I'm too busy to correct the Wikipedia entry, but somebody else can, if they like (and at least I know where I can look for it now).  [Later: I had tried to add this info, and thought it had failed, but it's there now, albeit without the references given here. Somebody else can fix that, if they wish.]

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You might think putting a name on the place you had settled would be a high priority for the colonists, but James Cook had named the land when he mapped the whole east coast in 1770, and called it “New South Wales”, based on some fancied resemblance to the southern coast of Wales. On the west side, the Dutch navigators called that area “New Holland”.

Until Matthew Flinders’ mapping voyage in the early 1800s, people were uncertain whether or not these two coasts were part of a single land mass or separated by a sea channel.

Officially, Flinders was the first person to use the name ‘Australia’, in his book, A Voyage to Terra Australis, published in 1814, but there is more to the story.

In 1793, George Shaw and James Edward Smith published the first volume of a planned 2-volume work called Zoology and Botany of New Holland. That first volume covered animals only, and on page 2, the careful reader might have noticed this:

The vast Island or rather Continent of Australia, Australasia, or New Holland, which has so lately attracted the particular attention of European navigators and naturalists, seems to abound in scenes of peculiar wildness and sterility …

Smith’s botany section, if it was ever written, never came out. Shaw wrote up the animals, so he probably deserves the credit for using ‘Australia’. In the Transactions of the Linnaean Society vol. iv, p 213 (1798), Smith called the continent ‘Australasia’ several times. 

The name ‘Australasia’ was certainly known before Flinders went into print, because an 1808 piece of verse in The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser makes a reference to “Australasia’s Black tribe”.

[It's here: The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, 6 November 1808, 2, https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/627622.]

Then just a few years later, The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser printed a poem in January 1813 which mentioned “… Australia’s rude Shore …”. 

[It's here: The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, 30 January 1813, 3, http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/628623 ]

This poem also pre-dates Flinders’ book, which came out the next year. Here is what Flinders wrote, on page iii:

It is necessary, however, to geographical precision, that so soon as New Holland and New South Wales were known to form one land, there should be a general name applicable to the whole … I have … ventured upon the readoption of the original TERRA AUSTRALIS, and of this term I shall hereafter make use, when speaking of New Holland and New South Wales, in a collective sense; and when using it in the most extensive signification, the adjacent isles, including that of Van Diemen, must be understood to be comprehended.

Having introduced ‘Terra Australis’, Flinders then added a footnote:

Had I permitted myself any innovation upon the original term, it would have been to convert it into Australia, as being more agreeable to the ear, and an assimilation to the names of the other great portions of the earth.

Within a few years, Governor Macquarie was referring to ‘Australia’ in dispatches to London, and in 1824, Sir Thomas Brisbane, governor of New South Wales, was delighted when his wife presented him with an heir, whom he named Thomas Australia Brisbane.

The land, the continent, the future nation, had a name, but that isn't how Wikipedia tells it.

That's why I once had to call for the sacking of an editor who altered my meticulously researched and correct spelling to follow three wrong spellings that said idiot had found on Wikipedia.  There's a price to pay if you rely mindlessly on the rich resources that Wikipedia delivers.