INDEX

• Introduction
• Maps
• Significant Places in Australia's Maritime History
• Naming Australia
• Naming Australia's Coastal Features

WHO DID DISCOVER AUSTRALIA?

• The Phoenecians & Egyptians
• The Greeks & Romans
• The Chinese
• The Muslims
• The Portuguese
• The Dutch
• The British
• The French

COLONIAL EXPLORATION

• Index
• The French
• The British
• Other
• Inland explorers

Who Did Discover Australia?: The Phoenicians

By Tab Benedict

James Cook discovered Australia alright - for himself But the Phoenicians got there first. The evidence is presented by Val Osborn in a report upon his searchings on Sarina Site, backed by a brief video (available frorn Val Osborn, Lot 8, Armstrong Beach Road, Sarina Queensland 4737, Australia).

He first discovered the complex in 1990 and has established it had all the signs of a typical Phoenician colony settlement of the ancient sea kings dating from around B.C. 1060. There are similar sites around the North African coasts including Carthage and Tyre and Sidon as Mediterranean capitals from around B.C. 1500. The sea king trading era began with the Minos Kings out of Crete and Libya, ending at Carthage approximately B.C. 2000 to B.C. 400.

There is a gap in historical sea lore until the 14th century A.D. and this would not be so regrettable had it not been filled with a whole new idea of Australian origins, politically inspired and fomented. The Sarina site's importance lies in this fact, says Val Osborn: "Proof of settlements and developments will change palaeontological history of aboriginal origins if evidence arises here of galley slaves utilised for colonisation."

"The argument that Jarnes Cook 'discovered' Australia is fallacious" he goes on. "His ship's log shows that he had maps. His instructions were to reconnoitre the coast for the purpose of colonising." He was due to build upon others' foundations. A typical Phoenician colony comprised an isthmus with freshwater springs, twin harbours built of stone set in furnace slag cement; houses of mud brick, with adjacent fields for crops of millet and barley. Religious edifices were to god and goddess Bel and Tanit with small shrines of sawn granite to a crude idol. There would also be a tophet cemetery. The sea people traded in exotic wares and supplied navigators with charts unobtainable elsewhere.

Ezekiel 27 and I Kings 10 describe the lifestyle, culture and cargo of such fleets: ivory from Africa, peacocks from India, marmosets from the Amazon, and so on. In ancient maps Australia was already pinpointed as Ophir, Big Java or the Aurea Chersenosis. Ophir gold was highly valued and black opal and sapphires from the region have been found in Nile jewellery. Sites all over Australia have yielded up documents in Egyptian, Hebrew, Phoenician and Ogam script - and yet the authorities shy away from the obvious connection.

Val Osborn notes: "The Freshwater Point complex is uniquely Phoenician, as are adjacent sites on the Queensland coast. The two artificial harbours meticulously engineered are quite large and represent the labour of many over centuries. Near a ruined jetty are slag heaps from furnaces of gold, mercury and copper ore. Evidence of refining exists on the Sarina Inlet area with a sluice race and an artificial reservoir of water lined with clay, some two acres overall."

He explains: "Mining was carried out by beating the rock then quenching with water to crack the ore body, levering the ore out and then crushing and refining into ingots. Over a million tonnes of ore have been removed and processed with placer deposits carefully cleaned out. A further bonanza for a colony could have been the wealth of cowries in the area, known as 'money cowries', worth their weight in gold in antiquity. As well, murex shells indigenous to Phoenicia and the Sarina area exist in abundance, from these shells, the famed Tyrean purple dye was extracted." He marvels: "The geology within Sarina shrine embraces almost every variation of rock development and mineral formation known to science. Rare earths exist in the ancient sediment as well. Very rare minerals are present along with rare metals and tiny gemstones. The entire area is known to be an unexploited gold and silver field."

Eventually, a choice will have to be made between tourism and industrial development. And it's not a question for entrepreneurs as most of the complex is Crown land and decades of archaeological investigation lie ahead. Its isolation makes it vulnerable to collectors and vandals, sophisticated and otherwise. The area is already a magnet. It hosts some 46% of Australian bird species and there is a vast marine life, unique to the area, as yet unexploited. The Sarina inlet covers some 3 kilometres of coastline with a shipyard, complete with a slip; revelments, walls and gigantic stone fish traps. The cemetery was actually for cremation, bones being interred in amphora. In the mines, blast furnaces constructed of refractory dolomite-slag brick were fed by wind funnelling oxygen from erected sails.

As to refining, Osborn offers: "The quarried calcite ore bearing gold, copper or mercury along with quartzite were extracted from the metamorphic zone. It was then mortared by hand to a crushed dust, put through sluices to extract the fines, then packed into small brick kilns constructed of numbered reinforced bricks of refractory dolomite and slag in the usual small refinery manner. Dolomite was mined from the east reefs and ingots of metal cast as wedges or 'ox hides' were then packed in straw as ballast in Phoenician vessels, according to tradition. Reject quarried ore was used to surface roads and landing areas. Slag cement from the blast furnaces on the beach was recycled in jetty construction. In the east jetty, huge andesite boulders taken from adjacent beaches were set in slag cement, presumably in wooden formes. In the north jetty complex, piers were constructed at intervals in the same manner. The Phoenicians were renowned for this type of unique slag cement construction. These andesite boulders do not absorb water and are unable to swell and crack the cement, as the tendency is with other rock."

The harbours exhibit signs of having been used by more recent shipping yet prior to Captain Cook's arrival. "However, Australian history of the last 200 years show no record whatsoever, and local shipping records and news going back to Mackay's founding show no indication of any knowledge of this area as a harbour" says Osborn. "Coastal packet steamers were ignorant of its existence, as are modern mariners including local fishermen. Admiralty maps show the site as an island."

Among the artefacts found is a cast iron tool which is identical with boat building tools depicted on a chiselled stone facade at an ancient shipyard on the Nile. And some granite pieces have handsaw marks identical to ancient Egyptian handsaw marks in granite. "The annals of ancient history" observes Osborn "associate the names of Queen Hatshepsut of Egypt and Ethiopia, King Solomon of Israel and Hiram the Phoenician of Tyre with three year voyages to Ophir (as Australia was known around B.C. 1000). In the era 90 AD, Ophir was stated by historians to be owned by India."

The historian Josephus tells of a cargo fleet setting sail for Ophir in search of a pure white timber for Solomon's Temple. This is Eungella white hazelwood (symplocus spicata) a giant native to Mackay and Fraser Island rainforests. The vessels themselves were built of Lebanon cedar and Aleppo pine and Bashan oak.

Osborn cautions, the project is still in its infancy and judgment must be reserved. This is especially so due to the aboriginal overlay on the Sarina environs. Ethnic groups from the Central coastal region have been identified by custom and physical attributes as originating from the upper Indus (Dravidian) and the African Congo (Negrito), They used the Phoenician foundations, such as the fish traps which could extend over ten acres. But these tribal communities didn't reach above a hundred per settlement, The Phoenicians had to cater for up to two thousand. Hence the aborigines did not build the fish traps to meet their needs, they used the giant installations already in place.

Osborn says: "The extent of labour required to construct the walls at the north harbour alone has been estimated by a marine engineer at approximately 1000 men working for one year. However, the richness of the ore bodies and gold placer deposits would have justified this outlay of labour."

The Phoenicians depended on fish to feed their galley slaves, origin: Ethiopia. Osborn says carefully: "The customs of east coast tribes show Mediterranean, African and Indian associations that have long mystified anthropologists, and if the Sarina site proves to be Phoenician, then the origins of Aborigines in Australia requires a thorough re- investigation.

One Day in 1931 at Glenloth, Victoria on a windswept sandhill, the remains of the shoreline of a long vanished lake about 100km south of the Murray River, John Gibbs, a 10 year old local boy was playing in the shellgrit on Ancient Aboriginal midden. In a basin of the sandhill amid broken shells, he picked up a large fragmenting, football sized lump of petrified mud. protruding from one of the fragments he found a small bronze coin. Years later a Melbourne's Museum Numismatist would identify it as Greek, and that it had been minted in Egypt during the reign of the Greek Ptolemy Philometor the 6th, in the 2ND century. The suggestion as to how the coin turned up where it was found is, of course, that it had been left behind by ancient visitors; Greek explorers perhaps, or even Arabs, Indians and Malayans with whom the Greeks traded. Similarly, in 1961 a family picnicking on the Daly River, west of Katherine in the Northern Territory, found a Gold Scarab, on object of worship of the Ancient Egyptians. How did this valuable ornament find its way to such a remote location? One might ask the same question of a 2,000 year old carved stone head of the Ancient Chinese Goddess Shao Lin (Protectress of mariners at sea), recovered from a beachfront hillside at Milton, on the New South Wales far south coast in 1983.

By the time the Phoenecians vanished they had influenced the cultures of the native peoples of the region, leaving behind them ghostly Megalithic ruins and temples, tombs and Pyramids, and rock scripts in a host of Ancient tongues; relics that continue to perplex conservative historians, and question the dogma that the peoples of the Ancient World lacked the ability to construct and navigate ocean going water craft. The fact is that people were putting out to sea centuries before the invention of a written language and that the water craft they sailed in were far from flimsy.

Ancient chronicles record Chinese voyages to Australia dating back to at least 1077 BC. There were probably earlier visits in search of minerals and other valuables but these records do not survive. But there maps do, as will be seen. So there can be little doubt from surviving ancient maps and classical literature that Australia, the fifth continent, was a land known to the maritime civilisations of the ancient world. According to some surviving writings of the ancients, Australia was known by many names. It was 'Ophir' or Land of Iron to the Phoenicians; 'Sinim' or Queen of the South to the Hebrews; the southern land of 'Chui Hiao' to the Chinese; 'Culhucan' or the Great land of the Serpent to the west {among other names} to the Aztecs, and 'Uru' to the Sumerians, Maoris and Peruvians {of which more will be said later}.

Many more names await the reader as we progress through this thesis. To the Egyptians of the Middle Kingdom {during the 12th dynasty-around 2000 to 1788 BC}'Punt' the land from which their trading vessels obtained frankincense, myth and other valuables was situated near present-day Somalia. Much later the name 'Punt' became confused and was a slang term for any generally unknown land in the Southern-Hemisphere and eventually linked with the mysterious great southern continent-Australia. They also called it 'Kenti-Amenti', the fabled "land of the Gods", the land or origin of all mankind.

Even the Bible contains a surprising number of references to the southern continent, such as in the Book of Isaiah where the prophet makes a passing mention of the people of the southern land of Sinim, "Queen of the South" which the Hebrews located far out in the Indian Ocean beyond the Oriental region. About 950 BC King Solomon and Hiram, King of Tyre had dispatched a fleet manned by Phoenicians into the Red Sea with orders to seek out the legendary Ophir and its' riches. Where the expedition penetrated is unknown. There is however a school of thought that 'Ophir' was the northwest coast of Australia and the source of the gold used in the building of King Solomon's temple.

The Persian Shah Namah, "Book of Kings" gives the name "Sveta-Dwipa" {The Sacred Land} to the vast southern continent located far across the {Indian} ocean beyond the known world. It was also known as 'Daglop', the Motherland of the World to the Tibetans, as written in their book "Bardo Thodol" and on Tibetan and Indian world maps dating back centuries. In 600 BC Anaximander drew a world map in Myletus describing a southern continent. Theopompus of Chios in the 3rd century BC drew a similar world map and wrote that, far beyond India and the known world there lay a great island in the region where Australia is now situated.

In 239 BC Eratosthenese, the Greek scholar drew a world map as a sphere, on which he described the great southern continent of 'Ausio'. He also measured the Earth's circumference as being 28,000 miles, an error of excess of only 13 per cent. It is obvious that maritime and geographical knowledge was far more advanced in the ancient world than hitherto realised by many historians. In 150 BC Crates of Mallos constructed an enormous world globe 3.3 metres in diameter in the ancient kingdom of Pergamum, near the Taurus Mountains in Asia Minor. This geographer taught that the earth was a sphere and needed balancing landmasses to keep it in equilibrium.

He therefore envisaged four continents divided by two great oceans, one with a north-south axis the other with an east-west axis, intersecting west of the Mediterranean. Asia/Europe/Africa he described as a single continent, 'Oecumene'. Seperated by his east-west ocean he described 'Perioeci' known as North America. Below this, in the vicinity of Panama and to the south of it he placed 'Antipodes', known today as South America. Far below these land masses in the region now occupied by Australia he placed 'Antoeci'. To the Greeks of Homers time {800 BC} the great southern continent was known as 'Ausio', the great south land of milk and honey.

It was also identified with the fabled land of 'Colchis' wherein was to be found the 'Golden Fleece', symbolic of all the wealth of the world; for the great southern continent had, since dim antiquity, been known to all the ancient maritime nations as being rich in gold, copper and all other valuable minerals and precious stones. Also, in 280 BC the Greek writer Euhemerus claimed in a novel of travel, "The Sacred Inscription" to have visited the island of 'Panchaia' in the Indian Ocean in the region now occupied by Australia. In "The life of Apollonius of Tyana" by Flavius Philostatus of Athens {175-249 AD}, there is a revealing passage which points to world geographical knowledge in antiquity. "If the land be considered in relation to the entire mass of water, we can show that the earth is the lesser of the two".

Unless the ancient Sumerians, Babylonians, Persians, Egyptians, Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans and others had not crossed the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, how else could Philostratus have known that the oceans cover the greater part of the earth's surface. Plato {427-347 BC} must have been cognisant of the great size of our planet, an also of continents beyond his own part of the world when he said in "Phaedo" that the people of the Mediterranean occupied only a small portion of the earth. "Besides the world we inhabit there may be one or more other worlds peopled by beings different from ourselves", wrote Strabo {1st century BC}. He even claimed that if the parallel of Athens were extended westward across the Atlantic Ocean, these other races might live in the temperate zone. Obviously he was referring to America.

Without any doubt, the ancients were far more advanced in their thinking than those Europeans of the Dark Ages, for they believed in a round earth. In Columbus' time nearly everyone believed the earth to be flat and that to sail too far out to sea would result in falling off the edge of the world into limbo! The Arabs and Chinese of this period however, were far more advanced in their geographical knowledge than their European contemporaries. Herodotus {born about 490 BC} tells us in "The Histories" that Aristagoras, the ruler of Miletus {500 BC} possessed a bronze tablet upon which lands and seas were engraved.

Pyheas of Marseilles, geographer and astronomer {330 BC} sailed as far as the arctic circle in the Atlantic Ocean and provided a scientific explanation of the midnight sun. Seneca {1st century BC} could have been thinking of the mysterious southern continent or America when he wrote his famous verse in the 'Medea'.

"There will come a time after many years when the Ocean will loose the chains that fetter things, and the great world will lie revealed, and a new mariner, like unto him who was Jason's pilot, Tiphys, will reveal a new world, and then Thule will not be the most extreme of all lands". In the 5th century BC Plato wrote in "Timaeus" about the Atlantic Ocean and all lands beyond America. "In those days the Atlantic was navigable from an island situated to the west of the straits which you call the Pillars of Hercules; from it could be reached other islands and from the islands you might pass through the opposite continent which surrounds the true ocean."

Plato obviously alludes to the Pacific Islands beyond the American continent, and Asia/Europe/Africa beyond. Thus, the ancient Greeks were familiar with the Australian region. I appear to be primarily quoting ancient Greek sources, but only because so many of their writings have come down to us from antiquity. It is certain that even they had borrowed the knowledge of far earlier civilisations concerning world geography. At this time the Chinese were not only making extensive world voyages but preparing maps of the lands they visited, and apparently returning home with animal curiosities, as we shall see further on in this book. Fragments of records tell of Greek voyages to the mysterious southern continent.

For example; About 300 BC Iambulus {as told by Diodorus Siculus} a Greek, set sail from Somaililand for the 'happy land of the south' said to lie across the (Indian) Ocean. On his return he described how he reached a land which could have been the Australian west coast. Besides seeing marsupials, he described meeting the human inhabitants. They were, he said, two faced, spoke with forked tongues and could carry on two conversations at once - obviously Australian Politicians! Then there was Eudoxus of Cyzicus about 146 BC who fitted out a large ship with supplies, artisans, physicians and dancing girls(!) on a voyage from the Red Sea to India.

He said he sailed off course and described reaching a land which could have been the west Australian coast. A Roman map of India dating from around 70 AD describes islands below India which could represent Ceylon {Sri Lanka}, Sumatra, Java and other identifiable lands, any one could be Australia, and below these stretches the crude outline of Antarctica. Another crude map, drawn by the Roman geographer Pomponius Mela in 40 AD describes a southern continent which he called 'Antipodes'. A manuscript fragment by an unknown Roman writer of the same period describes animals with pouches in which their young were carried.

The Roman map makers were well aware of the southern continent, no doubt through the assistance of Greek geographers and other, possibly much earlier sources. The periplus Maris Erythraei of 40 AD drawn by an anonymous Greek sea captain was a map showing where the Greeks had been and how to sail there. The map described their voyages to Sumatra but they must already have been aware of other lands beyond and also Australia. An ancient Greek legend of earlier times spoke of the 'Sacred Golden Mistletoe". This Mistletoe is not native to Europe and is only found in Australia. Lucian of Samosata {120 to 180 AD} wrote of a distant land where thee savage inhabitants carried their young in pouches. The two regions were marsupials are found are Australia and its neighbouring islands, and South America.

The first marsupial known in Europe was brought there in 1500 by the Spaniard Vincente Yanes Pinzon. It was the story of the 'monsterous beast' of Pinzon's and of trees "so large that it took six men with outstretched arms to span one", that led some early Australian historians to the conclusion that Pinzon, and Amerigo Vespucci {who accompanied him} had visited the southwestern corner of Australia, near the Leeuwin River. Thier 'monsterous beast' was a kangaroo, and the trees the big Jarras or karri gums of this region. Lucian came from Samosata, on the Euphrates; the Euphrates leads into the Persian Gulf from which vessels sailed for India and beyond before Lucian's time.

It seems likely that some story of marsupials may, second or third hand, have reached the Gulf Ports in the days of Lucian. Lucian also speaks of a 'sea of milk'. This phenomenon is also mentioned by later chroniclers as a well-known occurrence in the Sea of Celebes. Arabs, Malays, Javanese and Chinese were aware of Australia's existence centuries before European arrival. The Chinese claims are far too extensive to relate here, but some of the Arab claims deserve attention. The Arab writer, Schems-ed-din-Mohammed, Caliph of Damascus {1256-1327} wrote of an inhabited land beyond Madagascar, across the {Indian} ocean where Australia is situated.

The Arab geographer, Albulfeda {1273-1331} wrote of an Arab expedition having circumnavigated the earth which took place some time around 1300, and event that anticipated the feat of Magellan by two centuries. He also wrote that, if two persons set out from the same point and travelled around the earth in exactly opposite directions, they would come back to this same point but their calendar would differ by two days. An Arab writer does speak of an animal with a pouch but confuses it with a rhinoceros. Perhaps he have a second or third hand account of a Wombat.

A 13th century account states that the sultan of Egypt called to his aid the Admiral of the Dry Tree, a mystical land of the {eastern} border of the Persian empire {mentioned by Marco Polo}, in whose land the only currencies were giant millstones. Did the Persian Empire ever extend into the Pacific Islands? For the only region of which this is true or has ever been true as far as we are aware, is the Caroline Islands with their stone money. In 1332 Brochard, a German Dominican, presented to the Pope and to Philip of France a memoir in which he speaks of a voyage to the Indian Ocean in which he reached 24.S. but that merchants and men of good faith {presumably Arabs} had been down to 54.S.

These are Australian waters where they would have found land. The Arabs established trade routes on land and sea. Arab sailors made the journey round the Indian Ocean many times and learnt the patterns of tides and currents, and the seasonal pattern also of the monsoons. This knowledge of the ancients was suppressed and a flat earth was now official church dogma. Map making degenerated. One example is the "Mappa Mundi" of Richard de Haldingham of Lincoln in 1280; in which the world is conceived as a flat disc surrounded by ocean, its central waterway the Mediterranean and its precise centre at Jerusalem. To the north is a compressed British Isles, while the southern regions include a distorted Africa, near-east, mainland Asia and Indonesia, Australia and America are unknown! Yet despite these outward appearances, the Dark Ages were not entirely 'Dark', for ancient knowledge of the existance of a great southern continent lingered on. As will be demonstrated in later chapters, many European travellers and explorers did in fact sail in search of it. Scandinavians led the way. Old World knowledge may have been in decline or suppressed; but across the Atlantic, that of the as yet unknown {at least to Mediaeval Europeans}Amerindian civilisations in many ways far surpassed that of the Europeans, in the fields of astronomy, mathematics, geography and navigation.

Far from confining themselves to coastal fishing voyages, the seafaring peoples of the Inca and Mayan civilisations undertook voyages of exploration far out into the Pacific to lands beyond. They carried with them the stone-building techniques developed by their forefathers, leaving ghostly monuments in their wake. Heads of stone resembling those of the Olmecs occur across the Pacific into New Guinea waters. Peruvian cave and rock art has been found on the Australian east coast. Both Inca and Mayan peoples must have reached the Australian region otherwise, how else are we to explain the presence of Myan racial features found among the Gilbert Islanders and Mayan-style step pyramids on lonely Pacific islands?

Also, Peruvian racial features have been claimed to exist among some Arnhem Land Aboriginal tribes and Maori people of New Zealand. Last century American archaeologist and historical researcher, Augustus Le Plongeon MD argued that the Maya were skilled mariners who divided the earth into five major continents and measured the distance between them. They knew how to calculate the division of time into solar years of 365 days and 6 hours; that of the year into 12 months of 30 days, to which they added 5 supplementary days that were left without name and regarded as unimportant. Any ancient people possessing a higher civilisation of such attainments would surely also have been highly skilled in the maritime arts.

As the Dark Ages vanished, crusades to the Holy land and pilmigrages to Jerusalem gave way to the search for the Spice Islands. America and the mysterious southern continent. As the new dawn of exploration opened, two seafaring nations vied for the domination of the Pacific-Portugal and Spain-and a series of historical events were set in motion that culminated in the arrival of James Cook at Botany Bay in 1770, and the establishment of British settlement.

The British colonisation of Australia was but the last of many preceding contacts stretching back to Bronze Age times. Ages-old stories of the mystic 'Land of Gold' had bought the latter-day Europeans to our shores, and although their motives may not always {as in the case of Portugal and Spain} have been with some pios mission in mind, their arrival was nevertheless inevitable. We have seen that the ancients regarded the mysterious southern continent with awe, as an earthly paradise overflowing in all manner of wealth; yet even in the days of Homer, the southern hemisphere became synonymous to some with death and the afterworld and some bronze Age Greeks associated the southern continent with the Elysium fields where the souls of the dead resided.

This confusion of an earthly paradise with the after-world {or underworld} of the dead would persist into Mediaeval European times, but these thoughts do not appear to have plagued the minds of the average Bronze Age mineral-seeking explorer, who knew that the lands beyond the Erythraean Sea {Indian Ocean} were rich beyond imagination. Thus, in the wake of the extensive cross-ocean mineral-seeking and trade expeditions that increased worldwide as the Copper and then the Bronze Age wore on and, with seafarers from as far as afield as India, Mesopotamia, Egypt and the Mediterranean lands competing with one another in countless voyages that were crisscrossing the Indian Ocean, it is most unlikely that Australia could not have been discovered by any number of hardy mariners from many distant lands.

Perhaps too, even they were merely 'rediscovering' the mysterious great south land, for its existence had, it seems, always been preserved in the 'lost paradise' creation mythology of many nations over a vast area of the Euro-Asian continent. It was not only the 'motherland' of Man, but also a continent possessing vast; limitless quantities of all manner of mineral wealth, precious stones and pearls; the "Land of the Gods" of the Egyptians and the lost paradise of the Uru of the Sumerians. This author has no doubts that the Atlantis myth of Plato had its beginnings in a stone-age megalithic civilisation whose origins are shrouded in the dawn mists of Australia's 'unknown' history'.

Its ghostly stone monuments stand weathered in the harsh Australian sun, scattered across the continent, like thousands of perennial smiling Sphinxes, each possessing a great secret. This 'Land of the Gods' seemed destined to be the source of great quantities of precious metals for Bronze Age civilisations. Nations grew great through mining and trade in the Bronze Age and all employed the watery highways of the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Oceans in their trading endeavours and in the search for new lands rich in minerals. There was a worldwide unity of race through trade.

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