Austral English / A dictionary of Australasian words, phrases and usages with those aboriginal-Australian and Maori words which have become incorporated in the language, and the commoner scientific words that have had their origin in Australasia - Edward Ellis Morris

In 1606 the Spaniard Fernandez de Quiros gave the name of Terra Australis del Espiritu Santo to land which he thought formed part of the Great Southland. It is in fact one of the New Hebrides.

The word "Australian " is older than "Australia" (see quotations, 1693 and 1766). The name Australia was adapted from the Latin name Terra Australis. The earliest suggestion of the word is credited to Flinders, who certainly thought that he was inventing the name. (See quotation, 1814.) Twenty-one years earlier, however, the word is found (see quotation, 1793); and the passage containing it is the first known use of the word in print. Shaw may thus be regarded as its inventor. According to its title-page, the book quoted is by two authors, the Zoology, by Shaw and the Botany by Smith. The Botany, however, was not published. Of the two names—Australia and Australasia—suggested in the opening of the quotation, to take the place of New Holland, Shaw evidently favoured Australia, while Smith, in the `Transactions of the Linnaean Society,' vol. iv. p. 213 (1798), uses Australasia for the continent several times. Neither name, however, passed then into general use. In 1814, Robert Brown the Botanist speaks of "Terra Australis," not of "Australia." "Australia" was reinvented by Flinders.

Quotations for " Terra Australis"—

1621. R. Burton, `Anatomy of Melancholy' (edition 1854), p. 56:

"For the site, if you will needs urge me to it, I am not fully resolved, it may be in Terra Australis incognita, there is room enough (for of my knowledge, neither that hungry Spaniard nor Mercurius Britannicus have yet discovered half of it)."

Ibid. p. 314:

"Terra Australis incognita. ..and yet in likelihood it may be so, for without all question, it being extended from the tropic of Capricorn to the circle Antarctic, and lying as it doth in the temperate zone, cannot choose but yield in time some flourishing kingdoms to succeeding ages, as America did unto the Spaniards."

Ibid. p. 619:

"But these are hard-hearted, unnatural, monsters of men, shallow politicians, they do not consider that a great part of the world is not yet inhabited as it ought, how many colonies into America, Terra Australis incognita, Africa may be sent?"

Early quotations for "Australian"