Balder Ex-Libris

Author : Lee Francis Nigel
Title : The christian foundations of Australia
Year : 2000

Link download : Lee_Francis_Nigel_-_The_christian_foundations_of_Australia.zip

In the Jubilee History of Queensland, one reads "there are those who credit the discovery of Australia to the time of Alexander the Great, 327 B.C..... There can be little doubt that when Strabo wrote fifty years before Christ, and Pliny in the latter part of the first century, and Ptolemy (Claudius Ptolemaeus) in the second, 'of a land of beauty and bounty stretching far to the south of India beyond the equator to an unknown distance' — they...doubtless told the story of some early explorers who...beheld this land. Indeed, there is scarcely a century to be found in which some mention has not been made of this great Southern Land which, in the language of Agathemerus of the third century, 'was the greatest island in the World.'" Professor F.L.W. Wood, in his well-known Concise History of Australia indicates that already in Pre-Christian times the Greeks presumed there might well be a great Southern Continent. Perhaps then, suggests Wood, some descendants of Adam might have travelled as far as the Antipodes and flourished there. Thus too thought Albert the Great (1193-1280) and also even Roger Bacon (1214-1294). Stories from Marco Polo, who returned from China to Venice in 1295, confirmed the Ancient Greek presumption that Terra Australis alias Australasia might very well exist. Renaissance researches in astronomy and hydrography further confirmed the presumption. Thus, by the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries European experts knew that there must be a great Southern Continent. By 1603f, King James the First of England and Scotland had created the "Greater Union" flag — combining England's St. George's cross with Scotland's St. Andrew's cross. Then, in 1605 — just a decade before the Synod of Dordt — the Dutchman Jansz, sent by the Protestant Dutch East India Company to explore what is now the southern coast3 of Indonesia, entered Australia's Gulf of Carpenteria in his ship Duyfken — and followed the coast to Cape Keer-Weer (or Cape 'Turn-Back') in Queensland. ...