The Southern Cross Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

The logbook keeps track of the weather conditions (including a very nasty sounding lightning storm) and the plane’s altitude, speed, progress and physical condition as it speeds toward Australia. My favourite part is when the American radio operator on the Southern Cross informs Ulm that the plane’s beacon signal (a vital navigational aid) has failed. Ulm writes, “This is not so good”. Hence his nickname, Charlie “Understatement” Ulm (I just made that up).

Charles Ulm: not a man to overreact in a crisis

Kingsford-Smith, of course, was such a national hero that he managed to get himself onto our stamps and onto the original paper $20 note issued in 1966 (that I didn’t make up).

Browse the logbook of the Southern Cross (and admire its natty cover) at the National Library of Australia digital collections website.

(Of course, if you were alive in mid–nineteenth-century London and a daily user of hot air balloons, then you would see it every day, and can safely go about your business without following the link.)

Well, Black Dog Books have released another new anthology, publishing well-known authors alongside not-so-well-known authors, with all profits going to youth charities. It’s called Short and scary: a whole lot of creepy stories and other chilling stuff, and it’s edited by the wonderful Karen Tayleur. What’s more, inside its doom-laden, slime-mottled and mould-edged pages, you’ll find a short piece of mine entitled ‘Double-you, double-you, double-you’.

Short and scary, a new anthology published by Black Dog Books. Isn’t it amazing how IT’S YOUR DOOR ON THE FRONT COVER?

Lili Wilkinson assembled a stellar list of contributors for Short, and the talent in Short and scary is just as incredible. It’s pretty amazing to be published alongside people like Carole Wilkinson, Shaun Tan, James Roy, Andy Griffiths, James Moloney and Sally Rippin, among many, many others.

You should be able to find Short and scary in all good bookshops. If it’s not there, maybe you could ask for it. Remember, it’s for a good cause!

But that’s not what I meant.

What I meant is, I’m interested in money enough to write a book about it. Another thing I’m interested in is Star Wars (though ‘interested’ might be putting it mildly). So you can imagine my delight when I found these amazing origimi Star Wars spaceships made with US dollar bills.

Millennium Falcon by Won Park

X-Wing by Won Park

The origami artist (origamist?) is Won Park — and the Force is clearly strong with him. I’m no Jedi Master of origami — I couldn’t even call myself an origami Padawan — but I’m tempted to start folding up some of my Australian plastic money to see what I can make.

On second thoughts, maybe not. I need my money for food. (Speaking of which, have you bought a copy of Explorers yet?)

You can links to find more Star Wars-themed origami at the original article from Wired.com.

The October 2009 edition of Countdown: The School Magazine featuring my story ‘Snail Mail’ (note: my story has nothing to do with dragons)

Countdown is published by the New South Wales Department of Education and Training. I was thrilled to see that the story was illustrated by Stephen Axelsen, who wrote and illustrated what was one of my favourite books when I was growing up: The Oath of Bad Brown Bill.

The Oath of Bad Brown Bill by Stephen Axelsen

I don’t know what happened to my original copy of The Oath of Bad Brown Bill, but I was amazed to find a second-hand copy in pretty good condition in Phillip Island several years ago. Unfortunately I couldn’t find much about the book online (except for this LibraryThing entry), but it’s about a bushranger and his waggish steed Mudpie (their crimes include stealing the entire Queensland Mint!) and their encounter with the ghoulish Pale Jackeroo…

Now that I look back at it I can see a lot in Bad Brown Bill that probably influenced my imagination and interests: the vividly imagined historical Australian setting, the creepy monsters, and a horse that suddenly acquires the power of speech (though that last one will only make sense if my currently unpublished novel The Genie in the Dunnycan ever becomes non-unpublished).

‘Snail Mail’ was originally published in the Short anthology published by Black Dog Books early last year.

Short: a collection of interesting short stories and other stuff from some surprising and intelligent people edited by Lili Wilkinson

Black Dog are doing a similar anthology early next year, and I’m pleased to report that I have a short piece in that one too…

By my count, 28 Dutch ships either landed on the western coast of Australia or sighted part of it between 1616 and 1770. (There were also a couple of English and French ships in the same waters, and Dutch sailors also explored the north coast of Arnhem Land and the coast of the Gulf of Carpentaria during the same period.)

Twenty-eight doesn’t sound like many ships for such a long period — but the Dutch weren’t actually carrying out a planned program of exploration. In fact, most of these landings were accidental.

The first Dutchmen to visit Australia’s west coast accidentally were Dirk Hartog and his crew aboard the Eendracht. (I tell the story of Hartog’s voyage in Explorers). The shape of Australia as we know it today started to emerge as more and more Dutch ships made landfall on different sections of the coast, and as cartographers start adding the sections of coastline to their maps.

Hessel Gerritsz’s ‘Chart of the Malay Archipelago and the Dutch discoveries in Australia’, for instance, shows that a big chunk of Australia’s western (and southern) coast had been revealed by the explorations of the Dutch by as early as 1633.

Detail from Gerritsz, Hessel. ‘Chart of the Malay Archipelago and the Dutch discoveries in Australia’ MAP RM750. National Library of Australia. Reproduced with permission

I’ve put together another handy interactive Google Map (like I did for Willem Janszoon’s voyage aboard the Duyfken in 1606) to give a better sense of the map being filled in by showing some of the most significant landings or sightings along the western coast.

Of all these voyages, the one that fascinates me the most is the voyage of the Gulden Zeepardt along the southern coast. This was the first time Europeans entered the waters directly south of Australia. I get goosebumps thinking about what it must have been like for them to be exploring what was essentially a kind of ‘land at the bottom of the world’.

Unfortunately we don’t know much about the voyage, but we do know the ship reached the coast by accident, and that 30 of the crew had died of illness between Europe and Australia. Even with the crew so depleted, Thijssen and Nuyts must have thought it was worth exploring this new stretch of coastline — they may have even hoped that if they sailed far enough they’d see the land turn northward.

If they’d been able to keep sailing (presumably they turned back due to dwindling provisions), the crew of the Gulden Zeepaerdt might even have discovered the east coast of Australia — nearly 150 years before James Cook!

For a handy summary of all the known landings on the Australian coast, including some of the landings on the western coast not covered in my Google Map, visit the ‘Landings list’ page on the Australia on the Map website or download a copy of Great southern land: the maritime exploration of Terra Australis by Michael Pearson.

And as I said at the top, you can find out how Dirk Hartog came to make the first of these accidental landings by checking out Explorers. (It’s worth every cent!)

I knew there’d been Dutch landings on the Australian coast before James Cook claimed the eastern half of the continent for Britain in 1770. But apart from knowing about Dirk Hartog’s pewter plate, I didn’t really know much about who landed where, what they’d discovered, and what happened to them when they got there.

I’m pretty sure I never learnt about the Dutch captain Willem Janszoon and his voyage aboard the Duyfken.

Long story short: in 1606, Janszoon and his crew were searching for trading opportunities along the southern shores of New Guinea when they made what is believed to be the first European landing on the Australian coast.

Of all the voyages of discovery I researched for Explorers, the voyage of the Duyfken was the hardest to piece together. There’s no surviving journal or ship’s log to study. We only know the date of the Duyfken‘s departure from the East Indies (present-day Indonesia) because John Saris, an Englishman, happened to mention it in his diary:

[25 November 1605]…heere departed a small pinnasse [a light boat] of the Flemmings [Dutch], for the discovery of the nand [sic] called Nova ginnea [New Guinea], which, as it is said, affordeth great store of Gold…

Saris J. Quoted in Mutch TD. ‘The first discovery of Australia’. Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society 1942;28(5)

In June the next year, Saris learned that the Duyfken had returned — and that its mission to find treasure in New Guinea had been unsuccessful.

So we have a date for Janszoon’s departure and a rough date for his return — but how do we know where the Duyfken actually went, and how can we try to work out what happened along the way?

For a long time, historians could only guess what route the Duyfken took on its historic voyage of discovery. But in 1931, a map specialist named Frederick Caspar Wieder was studying an atlas at the Hofbibliothek in Vienna when he discovered the so-called “Secret Atlas of the East-India Company” — East India Company being the spice-trading company that sent Janszoon on his mission to New Guinea.

Inside the secret atlas was a copy of the East India Company’s chart of the Duyfken’s voyage. Wieder had discovered the first known example of the European charting of any part of Australia.

Dese pascaerte vertoont (route of the Duyfken). Reproduction from Monumenta cartographica. Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1925. MAP RA265 Part 125. National Library of Australia.

The National Library of Australia holds a copy of the Duyfken chart. I was lucky enough to be able to have a look at it when I visited Canberra in 2008.

The bit at the bottom right is part of the eastern coast of Cape York Peninsula — the part of Australia Janszoon and his crew explored. It’s a little hard to tell what’s going on in that chart without zooming back to see where this piece of land fits within the whole picture of Australia — so, using some internet voodoo and my ninja coding skills, I’ve put together a Google Map that lets you do just that.

We only have sketchy accounts of what actually happened during the voyage. For instance, the journal of Jan Carstenszoon, a Dutch sailor who explored the area for the East India Company in 1624, mentions a deadly encounter between the crew of the Duyfken and local Aborigines at the river now known as Wenlock River:

In the morning of the 11th [May 1623]… we sailed past a large river (which the men of the Duifken [Dutch spelling of Duyfken] went up with a boat in 1606, and where one of them was killed by the arrows [spears] of the blacks)

Journal kept by Jan Carstenszoon on his voyage to Nova Guinea. Quoted in Mutch TD. ‘The first discovery of Australia’. London: Royal Dutch Geographical Society, 1899. Chapter 8.

Another source of information about the voyage of the Duyfken are the oral histories of the Aboriginal people of Cape York Peninsula.

Historians have spoken to the descendants of the people who lived in the area where the Duyfken landed, giving us another view of the first known European contact with Australia:

The Aboriginal people saw the first Dutch ship north of the mouth of the river in 1606. They saw a big mob of logs that were huge, very big with lots of devils on them. The devils looked strange. Their skin looked different and they were white…

…

There was much fighting between the Dutch and the warriors. The Dutch shot many Aboriginal people along the river and in the bush land. Also, the warriors speared and killed some Dutchmen and made the Dutch go back to their ship. The warriors and the Aboriginal people saw the Dutch return back to where they came from.

Yuknaporta F. ‘Aboriginal tradition re the Duyfken’, 1999. Quoted in Henderson J. Sent forth a dove: discovery of the Duyfken. Nedlands (WA): University of Western Australia Press, 1999

(More Aboriginal oral histories of the Dutch explorers in Australia can be found in This is what happened: historical narratives by Aborigines published by the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, and Living black by Kevin Gilbert.)

We can put these few sources together and get a rough picture of what happened when the Duyfken landed on the Australian coast, but it’s disappointing that we don’t have a fuller account of this historic voyage.

Maybe Janszoon’s journal will surface one day in some library somewhere, and we can find out just what the crew of the Duyfken — as far as we know, the first Europeans to visit Australia — thought about the land they’d discovered.

Lately I’ve gone back to looking at maps of imagined places. Only these maps weren’t drawn by a Dungeons & Dragons nerd in suburban Melbourne in the mid-1980s — they were drawn by European cartographers hundreds and hundreds of years ago. And the imagined place on these maps isn’t a dragon’s lair filled with treasure and experience points; it’s Australia.

Well, sort of.

I’ve been looking at maps for my new book, Explorers: filling in the map of Australia. I’ve looked at everything from the four hundred year old chart of the Duyfken, the yacht that made the first known European landing on Australia, through to maps drawn after Federation in 1901, once most of the continent had been explored.

Some of the most fascinating maps are the ones drawn before Europeans had fully charted the oceans of the southern hemisphere. The 1570 world map below, drawn by Flemish cartographer Abraham Ortelius, shows a gigantic continent twice the size of Antarctica in the southern oceans. This enormous landmass is named Terra Australis Nondum Cognita (‘the great unknown south land’, also called Terra Australis). The familiar outline of Australia as we know it today is nowhere to be seen.

Map of the world, 1570. Ortelius, Abraham. Typus orbis terrarium. MAP NK 10001. National Library of Australia. Reproduced with permission

Ancient Greeks had speculated about the existence of a ‘great southern continent’ at least as early as the fifth century BC. They reasoned that a large landmass must have existed in the unexplored southern hemisphere to balance the land that was known to exist in the northern hemisphere. Ortelius’s map imagines what this land might have looked like, based partly on information gained from the voyages of Ferdinand Magellan and Marco Polo, but mostly by making lots of guesses.

Even toward the end of the eighteenth century, three hundred years after Ortelius drew his map, Europeans were still searching for something resembling Terra Australis. But by the time James Cook had made his second voyage (between 1772 and 1775), the mirage of the southern continent had melted away into the smaller continents of Antarctica and Australia, the islands of New Zealand, and the other islands of the South Pacific.

So, just as the people in the mid-twentieth century dreamed of going to the moon (check), and just as we now dream of setting foot on Mars (working on it) and travelling beyond the solar system (one day), the Ancient Greeks were dreaming of a gigantic continent on the other side of the world. Their ships weren’t advanced enough to reach it, so they could only imagine the strange creatures and fantastic treasures waiting to be discovered there…

It’s starting to sound a bit like Dungeons & Dragons after all.

The notes contain no fewer than 21 (count them, 21!) classroom activities on the topics I write about so fabulously in my book, including Aboriginal history, the discovery of Australia, European exploration and early settlement, convict history, cultural heritage, Federation, Australians at war, postal history and the history of communication in Australia.

It makes me wish I was back at school so I could say “Who is this Chris Miles, and who does he think he is, giving my teachers funny ideas and getting me to do no fewer than 21 (count them, 21!) classroom activities?!?”

Short: a collection of interesting short stories and other stuff from some surprising and intelligent people edited by Lili Wilkinson

It’s full of funny, bizarre, spooky, inventive stories, poems and cartoons. And the funny stuff is so much funnier than the pun I threw in at the end of the first paragraph there.

All royalties go to Big Brothers Big Sisters, so make sure you grab a copy. If it’s not in our favourite bookstore, ask them to order it in for you (ISBN 9781742030340). Or you can buy it online at the Black Dog Books website.