Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This clip shows historical re-enactments and scenes of Australia’s coastal landforms as the narrator, Bill Peach, describes early 19th-century speculation about Australia’s geography. A sequence illustrating Matthew Flinders’s 1801–03 survey of the coastline of Australia is followed by aerial footage of coastal areas. In the final scenes a re-enactment of life in colonial Sydney is accompanied by Peach describing how the British were, until 1813, confined to a small area in mainland New South Wales. Haunting music reinforces the narration.

Educational value points

• In spite of often intense speculation, British and European knowledge of the physical features of Australia was not well-established until the second half of the 19th century, despite the first European landfall on the continent having occurred in 1606 and Matthew Flinders (1774–1814) finally determining the shape of the continent in 1803. Before Flinders’s voyage there was even speculation that the continent was divided from north to south by a strait.

• After circumnavigating Tasmania in 1798, Flinders was given command of HMS Investigator in 1801 with instructions to survey the coast of New Holland. Before his ship, a converted collier, became totally unseaworthy he was able to explore the western and southern coastlines, as well as to rechart the eastern coast explored by James Cook. In doing so, he created highly accurate charts and proved there was no north–south strait dividing the continent.

• Flinders’s feat of exploration was marked by personal and professional misfortune. Although Investigator was the type of vessel recommended by Cook for long voyages, the deterioration of the ship and crew in 1803 meant that the detailed survey had to be cut short. On the way back to England, Flinders was interned on Mauritius for six years by the French, with whom Britain was at war, robbing him of fame and delaying the publication of his book and maps.

• In 1803 the British colonists, confined to the toehold they had established at Sydney, were just as ignorant of the geography of Australia as the people of Europe. The misty images of daunting landforms in the last part of the clip combine with the soundtrack and the voice-over to create a vivid impression of a penal colony imprisoned by its local geography and its ignorance of what lay beyond.

• Belief in a great interior river, as hypothesised by Flinders, or in an inland sea, as proposed by geographers of the time, was very long-lived in colonial Australia and it motivated exploration on land and at sea. Coastal surveys until 1843 searched for the mouth of the so-called 'great river’ and land expeditions were mounted by explorers such as Charles Sturt (1795–1869) in the expectation of finding the inland sea. Such beliefs were not finally dispelled until the 1880s.

• This clip is from the type of expository documentary that uses a celebrity narrator to maximise its appeal – in this case Bill Peach (1935–) who at the time was known throughout Australia as the former host of the current affairs program This Day Tonight. The ten-part series Peach’s Explorers capitalised on his reputation for authoritative research, down-to-earth historical explanation and high-quality writing established in earlier series such as Peach’s Gold.