Nexus - 0207 - New Times Magazine-pages

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Ancient Chinese in Australia Indeed, if you knew as much as I do about our early history of discovery & exploration, you would feel sorry for our teachers of history. They have to confine themselves to the old story of how James Cook (1770) discovered our east coast, although the Dutch visited our west coast fully 164 years before that date. In fact, the earliest sketchy outline of a great southern continent can be found upon one of a number of carved stone world maps preserved in Iran, carved by Persians up to 3,000 years ago. The Greek scholar Eratosthenes, included a southern continent in his world map, drawn as a sphere, in the 3rd Century BC. He approximated the Earth's diameter to within 1.3% of today's estimates, and also calculated that the continent of America comprised one third of the Earth's circumference, which was astonishingly close to the truth. Crates of Mallus, in Asia Minor, constructed a 5m diameter world globe in 1S0BC. Crates reasoned the Earth was a sphere and needed balancing continents to keep it in equilibrium. He therefore envisaged four continents divided by two great oceans. Africa, Europe, and Asia he described as a single continent, "Occumene”. Crates then drew in "Perioeci”, which we now call North America. Were the Dutch explorers really the first discoverers of Australia? or Portuguese? In the vicinity of Panama, and south of it, he placed “Antipodes", which is now called South America. His fourth land mass balancing out the other continents and situated far below what we now call the Indian Ocean, he named "Antoeci", now know as Australia. It certainly was not How much this great forward thinker depended upon reason, deduction or vague reports from seafarers we may never know. Nevertheless, he anticipated Columbus' discovery of America by more than 16 centuries and the discovery by European seamen of Australia 17.5 centuries later. Lucian of Samosata (120-180AD) wrote of a distant land far across the [Indian] ocean, where the savage inhabitants carried their young in pouches. Samosata stood on the Euphrates River, which flows into the Persian Gulf, from which vessels sailed for India and beyond. Had Lucian obtained a confused account of Australian aborigines and kangaroos from some mariner? Evidence of contacts with Australia by explorers from the ancient world abounds. Take, for example, the remains of an ancient shipwreck, thought to be that of a Phoenician trireme at least 2,000 years old, and which was located by the late Perth skin diver, Allan Robertson, in King Sound, Western Australia, some years ago. (A future article in Nexus by this author will explore the extensive evidence of middle east contacts with by Rex Gilroy NEXUS #17 APRIL-MAY 1992