The History of Australian Exploration Quiz

Answer: A dinner plate

The pewter dinner plate was inscribed with the short message giving the date, the name of the ship and the senior crew. It is the oldest European artefact in Australian history, and is now in a museum in The Netherlands. The island is in Shark Bay, and is the westernmost point of Australia.

Answer: Roebuck

Dampier went round the world three times, and popped up all over the place, from Peru to South Africa, Guam to Panama, Brazil to the Phillipines. Dampier was the captain responsible for marooning Alexander Selkirk, the inspiration for Daniel Defoe's novel, 'Robinson Crusoe'.

Roebuck Bay is just south of Broome, Perth is the state capital, hundreds of kilometres to the south, and Batavia is now known as Jakarta, Indonesia.

Answer: East coast

He first sighted land in what is now Victoria, and continued up the coast to the tip of present-day Queensland. The expedition's first actual landing was in Stingray Harbour, now Botany Bay. He damaged his ship on the Great Barrier Reef, and met some kangaroos, before heading north to New Guinea. From there, he dropped into Indonesia and South Africa before heading for home.

Bonus Question- Did you know that Captain Cook made three journeys around the world? He was killed on one of them- which one? (Think about it.)

Answer: Followed the mountain ridges

Previous expeditions and escaped convicts tried to cross the Blue Mountains (part of the Great Dividing Range), but all followed the same plan- to stay in the valleys- every valley ended in an unscalable cliff. Even though Blaxland, Wentworth and Lawson followed the mountain ridges, the going was not easy, with hostile natives, dense bushland and very narrow ridges dogging their every step. The Great Western Highway now roughly follows their route.

Going round the range was not an option, as it extends for hundreds of kilometres to the north and south, running parallel to the coast. Following the large river, now known as the Nepean River, would not have worked either, as its source is still on the eastern side of the Great Dividing Range.

Answer: Murray River

Hume and Hovell crossed the river in 1824 and named it the Hume River. Charles Sturt renamed it the Murray in 1830. The river now forms the majority of the border between New South Wales and Victoria.

The Yarra runs through Melbourne and the Swan flows through the Western Australian capital of Perth. The Orange River is in South Africa.

Answer: Tasmania was an island

Flinders and George Bass circumnavigated Van Diemens Land (now Tasmania), establishing that it was, in fact, a large island. A few years later, in 1803, Hobart was established as a penal colony and the vast majority of English prisoners were sent there. Port Arthur soon gained a fearsome reputation as the toughest convict colony in the continent. In 1996, it became the scene of the most deadly massacre in Australia's history, when a madman murdered 35 tourists, and wounded many others. I have been to the site, and it is the eeriest place that I have ever visited. The Isle of the Dead is a small islet just offshore. There are hundreds of bodies buried in unmarked graves.

The Great Barrier Reef does not quite reach as far as New Guinea and there were no kangaroos in New Zealand. It has been speculated that the Chinese visited Australia in the 1400s, but this has never been confirmed, and Flinders would certainly not have been able to suggest such a theory.

Answer: The inland sea

They did not find an inland sea, because it just does not exist. Much of the interior is classified as desert or semi-arid. Over 2.3 million hectares is desert. To put that number into perspective: Australia is the sixth largest country on Earth; the desert areas cover almost as much area as the seventh largest country, India. Most of the country has an annual rainfall of less than 25cm (about 9 inches).

Lasseter's Reef is an imaginary reef of gold, somewhere in the outback. Various treks have been made to discover it, since Harold Lasseter announced that he had found it in 1930. None have been successful; it may be out there somewhere, just down the road from the Fountain of Youth!

Early convicts were convinced that there was a land bridge to China, despite seafarers like Cook and Torres disproving this theory many years before.

Answer: Melbourne

Batman was born in Sydney, but moved to Van Diemens Land (Tasmania) when he was 20. He led an expedition to Victoria and made his pronouncement near the banks of the Yarra River, trading knives, mirrors and blankets with the local aboriginals for the land. Geelong, which is 75 kms south-west of Melbourne, was founded a couple of years later. Both settlements went through a massive population growth when the Victorian gold rush started in 1850.

Palmerston was founded in 1869, and changed its name to Darwin in 1911. It was a backwater town until the 1950s, when its population escalated. It is now the capital of the Northern Territory.

Gotham City is home to the superhero Batman, and is not in Australia.

Answer: A parrot

The Major Mitchell cockatoo is a large parrot. It has distinctive colouring, with a pink chest, white wings and a bright red and yellow crest.

Major Mitchell, (the explorer, not the bird!), was Surveyor-General of New South Wales, and was responsible for mapping all the new discoveries. He made three trips to the Darling, before heading north, in 1845, to search for a large river that was theorised to run northerly through Queensland. There is no such river.

Answer: The Dig Tree, Coopers Creek

Their mission was to cross the continent from south to north and return. The whole show was badly timed, badly led and badly provisioned. Marching through outback Queensland in summer was just crazy; temperatures topped 50C (120F) for days on end. Burke and Wills broke up the expedition to make an unencumbered dash for the Gulf of Carpentaria (in northern Queensland), but ran dangerously low on supplies. The remainder of the expedition had remained at Coopers Creek to await their return. They left only hours before the explorers returned, but they had carved in a tree the instructions 'DIG' and a nearby location. They rested and used the supplies, but they were still stranded in the desert, and eventually died while trying to get home.

The Tree of Knowledge in Barcaldine was where the Australian Labor Party was founded, in 1891. This action rose out of a shearers strike and dissatisfaction with the government. The Marked Tree, or Explorers Tree, is just outside Katoomba. There has been ongoing debate about the authenticity of the marking, which were alleged to have been made by Blaxland, Wentworth or Lawson in 1813.

Bandiana is an Australian Army base, and is home to the military, but not the Miller Tree; I just made that up.