Matthew Flinders. 1774-1814.
Matthew Flinders was born into a medical family at Donington near Boston and the Lincolnshire coast in 1874. His father wanted him to become a doctor by young Matthew was fascinated with the sea and wanted a naval life. After his education he joined the British navy in 1879. In 1891 he served under Captain William Bligh on a voyage to Tahiti and then he returned to England in 1794. He returned to the South Pacific in 1895 to Port Jackson NSW when he became friends with the ship’s surgeon on the voyage George Bass. After his arrival in NSW he sailed with Bass to Norfolk Island and explored the southern coast of NSW before heading to Cape Town. In 1798 the young Lieutenant Flinders explored further with Bass and the pair circumnavigated Van Diemens Land proving it was an island. By then he had considerable experience in navigation and accurately charting coasts and inlets. The highly respected young navigator returned to England in 1801 and published his book on Van Diemens land and Bass Strait. In 1801 he was promoted to Captain and charged by the Admiralty to explore the unknown coast from the Australian Bight to Victoria. He asked for his new wife to accompany him on the voyage in the Investigator but that request was denied. He next saw his wife nine years later. His first landing, in what was to become South Australia, was in February 1802 when he named Fowlers Bay. He reached Port Jackson in May 1802, made repairs to his unseaworthy boat the Investigator, and sailed northwards to Torres Strait and then south to Cape Leeuwin and back to Port Jackson, becoming the first person to circumnavigate New Holland and the British convict settlement. Flinders named this continent Australia. In 1803 he began to sail back to England but had to return for repairs to Port Jackson. He continued further on his second attempt to return to England but stopped at French controlled Mauritius for more repairs on the voyage home. That was in December 1803. There is was falsely imprisoned as a British spy and held for seven years only leaving Mauritius in June 1810 and being reunited with his wife in October 1810 just over nine years since he had last seen her in July 1801. He was suffering extremely bad health by then and worked despite his pain and agony of his great work – A Voyage to Terra Australis with its complete charts and drawings of South Australia and other coastlines. This mammoth two volume work with one volume being an atlas was published the day before he died on 19th July 1914. He was just forty years old. He was survived by his wife and his daughter Ann who was born in 1812. He was buried in St James cemetery London. In 1837 the terminus of the Birmingham to London railway line was established nearby and named Euston Station. When it expanded in the 1840s into St James burial ground headstones and burial remains were lost.
Statues of Captain Matthew Flinders.
Matthew Flinders had one daughter named Ann before he died. She was born on 1 April 1812. She later married William Petrie. Ann died in 1892 and her husband died in 1908. They had one son William Matthew Flinders Petrie who was born in 1853 and lived until 1942 and they also had a daughter. William Petrie was commonly known as Flinders Petrie. He was an internationally known Professor of Egyptian archaeology and he wanted to ensure that the memory of his grandfather was not forgotten. Professor Petrie had inherited the private diaries of Matthew Flinders covering the period from 1803 until just nine days before Flinder’s death in 1814. In 1920 Professor Petrie publically said he would donate these dairies to the first Australian city to erect a jumped at this opportunity. Flinder’s diaries was given to the Mitchell Library in 1920. The statue of Captain Flinders was commissioned in late 1920 and arrived in Sydney in 1922 but was not officially unveiled until late October 1925 in front of the entrance to the Mitchell Library. But the private diaries of Matthew Flinders lay unpublished in the Mitchell Library until 2005 when the by the Friends of the State Library of South Australia, with the assistance from Flinders University, published these private diaries.
Adelaide has a fine granite plinth for its statue of Captain Matthew Flinders on North Terrace beside the National War Memorial (South Australia). Flinders deserves this most prominent of places. But the erection of this statue proved to be a long saga. In 1914 the Lord Mayor of Adelaide suggested a statue be erected as it was the centenary of Flinders’ death and no statue existed. The next Lord Mayor in 1916 supported that the idea which was shelved in 1914 because World War One. He said the statue should be acted upon as soon as the War ended. The succeeding Lord Mayor suggested it again in 1919 but nothing happened. The year before Professor Flinders Petrie offered Matthew Flinder’s private diaries to the Australian city that first erected a statue of Flinders. Community organisations in Adelaide took action. The Royal Geographical Society of SA, the South Australians League of Empire, the Navy League and the Royal Society of St George united to urge the City Council to erect a statue of Flinders. A senior SA public servant had met Professor Flinders Petrie in London and had failed to secure Flinder’s diaries because Adelaide had no statue. So in April 1921 a public meeting was held to raise funds for a statue with a committee set up to manage this process. Interest waned until Sydney and Melbourne erected statues to in 1925. Melbourne Council started planning a statue in 1922 but arguments arose about why it should be in Melbourne when Flinders only set foot on Victoria soil near Geelong. Melbourne received the plaster cast of the statue in late 1924 and arranged for the plinth to be made at its location beside Melbourne’s Anglican Cathedral. Their statue of Flinders and two seamen was unveiled on 8 November 1925 in competition to that of Sydney a couple of weeks earlier. In November 1925 Adelaide residents were angry that they did not have a bronze of Matthew Flinders but Sydney and Melbourne did. Fund raising began again and the statue was finally unveiled on 12 April 1934. Adelaide’s statue was created by English sculptor Frederick Hitch.
There is also a fine sandstone statue of Matthew Flinders in a niche in the Department of Lands Building in Bridge Street Sydney along with 31 other white male notables of the 19th century. This statue was erected with the building in 1891. The most recent statue of Matthew Flinders was commission for the bi centenary of his death in 1814 which is located on the main concourse of Euston Station in London with his cat Trim at his feet. The statue was unveiled in 2014 and designed by British sculptor Mark Richards showing Flinders examining a chart of Australia with his faithful cat at his feet. Two marquettes, or small scale models, of this large bronze statue were given to South Australia. One is located outside the Town Hall in Port Lincoln which was named by Flinders and the other is now at Flinders Railway station by Flinders Hospital in Adelaide. Another maquette is on display in Lincoln Cathedral England as over 70 maquettes were made of the bronze statue but most are in private collections.
Flinders charting the gulfs and coast of South Australia.
When the Investigator left England it had a year’s supply of food- salted meat, hardtack- a type of hard baked bread- like a biscuit, and some livestock- sheep, pigs, goats and fowls. They also took presents for the natives. They included looking gasses, mirrors, pocketknives, combs, earrings, beads, red caps, blankets, needles, thread, shoemakers’ knives, scissors, hammers, axes, and hatchets. Flinders did not usually approach Aborigines but waited for them to approach him. He was patient and always kept a respectful distance but he did not record meetings with Aborigines in South Australia as he seldom was on in June 1802 to sail to the Torre Strait and to circumnavigate Australia he took two Aboriginal men with him. One was Bungaree who had sailed with him to Norfolk Island in 1798 with George Bass. The other was Nanbaree and the men were both from the Sydney area. Flinders noted that once they left the Sydney area the men were useless for language translation but helpful in approaching other Aboriginal people. On their northern only fired once Flinders felt unsafe at times when near Aboriginal men. Only one sailor was speared and killed by Aborigines in northern Australian and Flinders was angry that the sailor had caused offence. Retaliation led to one Aboriginal man being killed before Flinders crew moved on. The Investigator expedition was not just about exploring the unknown southern coast but also about describing botanical items, collecting shells etc. Flinders drew the coastline and hills but the voyage artist was Ferdinando Bauer, the botanist was Robert Brown, the mineralogist was John Allen and William Westall was the landscape artist. Drawings and specimens of the voyage ended up in various museums in London and Vienna in particular.
After leaving Cape Leeuwin Matthew Flinders sailed along the Great Australian Bight and started charting and naming places in South Australia starting with Fowlers Bay on 8 January 1802. He named it after one of his officers on the Investigator. As he moved on he named about 135 South Australia coastal sites. On 7 February he named Denial Bay( Ceduna) as there was no major river entering into the bay as he had hoped for followed by Smokey Bay as bush fires had lefty a cloud of smoke across the bay and then he went on to name Streaky Bay as sunlight reflected across the bay give it a streaky appearance. Further south off what is now Elliston he named Flinders Island after his younger brother Samuel. The island group there is known as the Investigator Group of islands. SA’s Flinders Island is not to be confused with Flinders Island in Bass Strait which was named after Flinders by NSW Governor Phillip King. Flinders noted wallabies on this island off Elliston and by the 1820s and 1830 whalers and sealers operated from it. In the 1890s the Schlink family lived on the island with about 1,500 acres growing oats, wheat ad grazing sheep. In 2020 the owners signed an agreement with the SA government to make most of the island a protected environmental area for penguin, seals, and bird life. In 2012 the waters around Flinders Island were appropriately designated as the Investigator Marine Park. Further down the coast Flinders explored the inlet which he named Coffin Bay after Admiral Sir Isaac Coffin. The southernmost point of Eyre Peninsula he named Cape Catastrophe because on 21 February 1802 eight of his crew in a cutter, searching for fresh water, were capsized by a wave and drowned. Captain Flinders were deeply saddened by this disaster and named eight nearby islands after the dead sailors. He next stopped at the first harbour of the gulf which he named Spencer’s Gulf after the First Lord of the Admiralty Lord Spencer. This locality he named Port Lincoln after his home county and the island there he named Boston after the nearest town to his home in Lincolnshire. He also named the Sir Joseph Banks group of islands.
Towards the top of Spencers Gulf he named Middleback Ranges, Hummock Hill (later Whyalla), Point Lowly and at the head of the Gulf he named Mt Brown after the botanist and naturalist on the Investigator and he record a rugged range of mountains. He landed at a site now part of Port Augusta and crossed country to the foot of these ranges which were named such by Governor Gawler in 1839. On the eastern side of Spencers Gulf he named Point Pearce after Mr Pearce of the Admiralty and Hardwick Bay after Charles Yorke who later became Lord Hardwick First Lord of the Admiralty in 1810. He also named Althorpe Islands and Corny Point. Althorpe Islands were named after Lord Spencer’s son Viscount Althorpe. He sailed up Gulf of St Vincent which he named on 30 March 1802 after Admiral John Jervis who was the Earl of St Vincent. He land at the top of St Vincent Gulf at what later became Port Wakefield and named Hummocky Mountain. On the way down St Vincent Gulf he named Mt Lofty from the sea before landing on an island with a plentiful supply of kangaroos. Flinders named it Kangaroo Island on 22 March. The crew needed some fresh meat as they had had none for four months and Flinders recorded that his men killed 31 kangaroos. A hundredweight of kangaroo tails, forequarters and heads were made into soup, and steaks were cut for both officers and crew which they ate for several days. They were able to take on water from Kangaroo Island. Flinders named Investigator Strait for the ocean separating Yorke Peninsula and Kangaroo Island and Backstairs Passage for the strait separating Kangaroo Island and the Fleurieu Peninsula. He named the southern point of Fleurieu Peninsula Cape Jervis after John Jervis the Earl of St Vincent. The accuracy and detail of his charts can be seen in Flinder’s 1814 map of upper Spencers Gulf from his exploration charts and recordings. Upon leaving Kangaroo Island Flinders named Encounter Bay and Baudin’s rock at Robe. The bay there had already been named by French Captain Nicolas Baudin as Guichen Bay. Flinders then moved eastwards but the lower South East coast of SA had already been charted by Captain James Grant in 1800 when he named Cape Banks, Cape Northumberland etc.
Fleurieu Peninsula, Encounter Bay and Baudin.
Captain Nicolas Baudin was in South Australia waters between March and April 1802. On his 1802 voyage Baudin had named in the South East, Carpentier Rocks, Rivoli Bay, Cape Jaffa, Cape Dombey and Guichen Bay (Robe), Lacapede Bay ( Kingston) and finally Fleurieu Peninsula. The Fleurieu was named after Count Charles de Fleurieu a French naval officer, cartographer and the Minister for Marine. On 9 April 1802 Baudin on Le Géographe and Flinders on the Investigator accidentally met at Encounter Bay. Like Flinders voyage this was a scientific voyage too with naturalists, botanists, zoologists etc on board. Despite not speaking French Flinders went aboard the Géographe and met Baudin who spoke some English. Flinders was unaware of the Baudin expedition and asked if Baudin was the captain. Baudin on the other hand knew who Flinders was and new about his voyage. In their discussion Flinders said that he had named Kangaroo Island and nearby geographical features. But when Baudin produced maps of the area back in Paris the name of Kangaroo Island was changed to Ile de Decrès, Backstairs Passage became Détroit de Colbert and Investigator Strait became Détroit de Lacapede. Baudin’s second in charge Louis Freycinet admitted Flinders had made new discoveries and named them but the Parisiennes kept the French names. Freycinet returned to chart more of Spencers Gulf in 1803. Both Baudin and Flinders returned to Port Jackson and the two met again in Sydney in May and June of 1802. The two captains obviously respected each other. When Flinders was later imprisoned and arrested in Mauritius Baudin tried to get him released but the authorities remained steadfast in their decision. But the French and English had some different values. When Captain Baudin left Sydney to return to France he took with him, with the Governor Phillip King’s approval, a young convict girl to be his mistress on the voyage.
In 1902, during the centenary of Flinder’s survey of South Australia, a tablet commemorating the meeting between Flinders and the Captain Nicolas Baudin was installed on the Bluff at Encounter Bay. The cairn is located at Rosetta Head on the top of the Bluff nearly 100 metres above sea level. It was unveiled by the SA Governor Lord Tennyson.
