Before the maps said Australia, European charts argued in older names: Terra Australis for the great southern land that might or might not exist, and New Holland for the coasts the Dutch had already bumped into. In January 1688 English seaman William Dampier, then sailing with buccaneers in the Cygnet, spent weeks on the Kimberley shore of what is now Western Australia. His book A New Voyage Round the World (1697) gave English readers their first thick description — and the line this post has always reached for:
New Holland is a very large tract of land. It is not yet determined whether it is an island or a main continent; but I am certain that it joyns neither to Asia, Africa, nor America.
A century later, even after Cook’s east-coast run and the name New South Wales, sober geographers still weren’t sure whether New Holland and the eastern claim were one continent or a nest of islands parted by straits. Flinders and the coastal surveyors closed that argument and helped fix Australia as the name that stuck. Phillip’s choice of Sydney Cove in 1788 is a different chapter — harbour and freshwater, not Dampier’s sandy west-coast bay. Keep the names straight, and don’t pretend 1688 and 1788 were the same voyage.