There is still debate in the world about who discovered Australia. Some argue that this is James Cook, a navigator from England. Others are sure that the Danes were the discoverers of the continent, looking for a way to their colony in Java.
In general, the first people appeared here long before the Europeans. More than forty thousand years ago, this continent was chosen by immigrants from the southern regions of Asia. The mysterious terra incognita australius (unknown southern land) - ancient geographers still knew about it. Already in the fifteenth century on the maps they denoted the mysterious continent. True, the outlines on them of this vast territory of land do not resemble real Australia in any way.
The Portuguese enter into a debate about who discovered Australia, claiming that Portuguese sailors received information about the new continent as early as the sixteenth century from Aboriginal Malays who caught sea cucumbers in the coastal waters of an unknown mainland. But the first leg of a European stepped on Australian soil only in the seventeenth century.
The history of the discovery of Australia for a long time was associated with the name Cook, but still the first inhabitants of Europe to visit the green continent (as Australia is sometimes called), the Dutch say. No wonder the western part of this amazing continent later became known as New Holland.
In 1605, Willem Janszon from Holland, who crossed the Torres Strait, sailed along the Cape York Peninsula. A year after that, Torres from Spain discovered the strait that separates the island of New Guinea from the continent. In 1642, Dane Abel Tasman visited the southwestern part of Tasmania, considering it part of Australia. Both Janszon and Tasman met aborigines on the mainland.
And the Dutch, the Spaniards, and the Danes did not publicly announce the opening of a new continent. It is because of the secrecy of the discoverers that the question of who discovered Australia is now disputed by the British, who came to this land 150 years after the first Europeans.
In 1770, the ships of James Cook moored on the east coast of Australia, who immediately proclaimed the new lands by English possessions. Soon, a royal “penal colony” was created here for criminal elements, and a little later for British political exiles.
In 1788, the British, who arrived with the “first fleet” on Australian soil, founded the city of Sydney, which later became the center of the British colony. With the “second fleet” the first free settlers sailed, who began to vigorously explore the expanses of the green continent.
The mainland, originally called "New Holland", by the end of the 18th-beginning of the 19th centuries with the light hand of the English hydrograph Flinders began to be called "Australia". Aborigines by this time were brutally exterminated by the colonialists. The indigenous population was raided, hunted, natives poisoned, and for the dead paid bonuses. A hundred years after the appearance of the British on the mainland, most of the local residents were exterminated, and the survivors were driven into the central regions of the continent, lifeless and deserted.
More recently, new facts have become known. So, before James Cook, another Briton, William Dampier, visited this southern mainland. And in 1432, the Chinese navigator Zeng He visited Australia.
Nevertheless, none of the modern world powers can be considered a country that has opened the green continent to the world. The first, long before the Europeans, were the ancient Egyptians. They used eucalyptus oil, a tree that grew only in northeast Australia, for mummification. And on the rocks of this continent you can find ancient images of scarabs - the sacred beetles of Ancient Egypt.
So, the question of who discovered Australia is a very controversial issue that historians are still struggling with.