Captain Matthew Flinders (16 March 1774 – 19 July 1814) was an English Royal Navy officer, navigator and cartographer who led the first inshore circumnavigation of mainland Australia, then called New Holland.

[1] Flinders was involved in several voyages of discovery between 1791 and 1803, the most famous of which are the circumnavigation of Australia and an earlier expedition when he and George Bass confirmed that Van Diemen's Land was an island.

In captivity, he recorded details of his voyages for future publication, and put forward his rationale for naming the new continent 'Australia', as an umbrella term for New Holland and New South Wales – a suggestion taken up later by Governor Macquarie.

The location of his grave had been lost by the mid-19th century, but archaeologists, excavating a former burial ground near London's Euston railway station for the High Speed 2 rail project, announced in January 2019 that his remains had been identified.

The expedition arrived in Jamaica in February 1793, offloading the breadfruit plants, and then returned to England, with Flinders disembarking in London in August 1793 after more than two years at sea.

[citation needed] HMS Reliance arrived in Port Jackson in September 1795, and Bass and Flinders soon organised an expedition in a small open boat named Tom Thumb, in which they sailed with a boy, William Martin, to Botany Bay and up the Georges River.

[8] In 1798, Flinders, by then a lieutenant, was given command of the sloop Norfolk with orders "to sail beyond Furneaux's Islands, and, should a strait be found, pass through it, and return by the south end of Van Diemen's Land".

Flinders, with Bass and several crewmen, sailed the Norfolk along the uncharted northern and western coasts of Van Diemen's Land, rounded Cape Pillar and returned to Furneaux's Islands.

[12] Most of the meetings between the Aboriginal people of Moreton Bay and Flinders were of a friendly nature, but on 15 July at the southern tip of Bribie Island, a spear was thrown which resulted in a local man being wounded by gunfire.

The local Aboriginal people initially indicated that Flinders' group should "return from whence they came", but relations improved to the point where one resident participated in musket-drill with the ship's marines.

[8] While approaching Port Lincoln, which Flinders named after his home county of Lincolnshire, eight of his crew were lost when the sailing cutter, in which they were attempting to return to the ship after an expedition to the mainland, capsized.

[8] On 8 April 1802, while sailing east, Flinders sighted Géographe, a French corvette commanded by the explorer Nicolas Baudin, who was on a similar expedition for his government.

[18] After scaling the You Yangs to the northwest of Port Phillip on 1 May, he left a scroll of paper with the ship's name on it and deposited it in a small pile of stones at the top of the peak.

[20] The Lady Nelson was deemed too unseaworthy to continue, and Captain Murray sailed her back to Sydney with his crew and Nanbaree, who wanted to return home.

At nearby Caledon Bay, Flinders took a 14-year-old boy named Woga captive in order to coerce the local people to return a stolen axe.

On 17 February 1803, near Cape Wilberforce, the expedition encountered a Makassan trepanging fleet captained by a man called Pobasso, from whom Flinders obtained information about the region.

Flinders then took command of the 29-ton schooner HMS Cumberland in order to return to England, but the poor condition of the vessel forced him to put in at French-controlled Isle de France (now known as Mauritius) for repairs on 17 December 1803, just three months after Baudin had died there.

The full title of this book, which was first published in London in July 1814, was given, as was common at the time, a synoptic description: A Voyage to Terra Australis: undertaken for the purpose of completing the discovery of that vast country, and prosecuted in the years 1801, 1802, and 1803 in His Majesty's ship the Investigator, and subsequently in the armed vessel Porpoise and Cumberland Schooner.

[37] This was on the day after the book and atlas was published; Flinders never saw the completed work (as he was unconscious by that time), but his wife arranged the volumes on his bed covers so that he could touch them.

This is well documented in correspondence between Flinders and his chief benefactor, Sir Joseph Banks, in May 1801:[59] I have but time to tell you that the news of your marriage, which was published in the Lincoln paper, has reached me.

This I was very sorry to hear, and if that is the case I beg to give you my advice by no means to adventure to measures so contrary to the regulations and the discipline of the Navy; for I am convinced by language I have heard, that their Lordships will, if they hear of her being in New South Wales, immediately order you to be superseded, whatever may be the consequences, and in all likelihood order Mr. Grant to finish the survey.As a result, Ann was obliged to stay in England and would not see her husband for nine years, following his imprisonment on the Isle de France (Mauritius, at the time a French possession) on his return journey.

Later that year, he wrote to Sir Joseph Banks and mentioned "my general chart of Australia", a map that Flinders had constructed from all the information he had accumulated while he was in Australian waters and finished while he was detained by the French in Mauritius.

Flinders explained in his letter to Banks:[65][66] The propriety of the name Australia or Terra Australis, which I have applied to the whole body of what has generally been called New Holland, must be submitted to the approbation of the Admiralty and the learned in geography.

It seems to me an inconsistent thing that captain Cooks New South Wales should be absorbed in the New Holland of the Dutch, and therefore I have reverted to the original name Terra Australis or the Great South Land, by which it was distinguished even by the Dutch during the 17th century; for it appears that it was not until some time after Tasman's second voyage that the name New Holland was first applied, and then it was long before it displaced T’Zuydt Landt in the charts, and could not extend to what was not yet known to have existence; New South Wales, therefore, ought to remain distinct from New Holland; but as it is requisite that the whole body should have one general name, since it is now known (if there is no great error in the Dutch part) that it is certainly all one land, so I judge, that one less exceptionable to all parties and on all accounts cannot be found than that now applied.Flinders continued to promote the use of the word until his arrival in London in 1810.

[68][69] Banks said in the draft: It was not until after Tasman's second voyage, in 1644, that the general name Terra Australis, or Great South Land, was made to give place to the new term of New Holland; and it was then applied only to the parts lying westward of a meridian line, passing through Arnhem's Land on the north, and near the Isles St Peter and St Francis on the south: All to the eastward, including the shores of the Gulph of Carpentaria, still remained Terra Australis.

It is necessary, however, to geographical precision that the whole of this great body of land should be distinguished by one general term, and under the circumstances of the discovery of the different parts, the original Terra Australis has been judged the most proper.

Of this term, therefore, we shall hereafter make use when speaking of New Holland and New South Wales in a collective sense; and when using it in an extensive signification, the adjacent isles, including that of Van Diemen, must be understood to be comprehended.Although Thévenot said that he had taken his chart from the one inlaid into the floor of the Amsterdam Town Hall, in fact it appears to be an almost exact copy of that of Joan Blaeu in his Archipelagus Orientalis sive Asiaticus published in 1659.

[71] In his Voyage, Flinders wrote:[72] There is no probability, that any other detached body of land, of nearly equal extent, will ever be found in a more southern latitude; the name Terra Australis will, therefore, remain descriptive of the geographical importance of this country, and of its situation on the globe: it has antiquity to recommend it; and, having no reference to either of the two claiming nations, appears to be less objectionable than any other which could have been selected....with the accompanying note at the bottom of the page:[73] Had I permitted myself any innovation upon the original term, it would have been to convert it into Australia; as being more agreeable to the ear, and an assimilation to the names of the other great portions of the earth.So Flinders had concluded that the Terra Australis, as hypothesised by Aristotle and Ptolemy (which would be discovered as Antarctica less than six years later) did not exist; therefore he wanted the name applied to the continent of Australia, and it stuck.

In July 2014, on the 200-year anniversary of his death, a large bronze statue of Flinders by the sculptor Mark Richards was unveiled at Australia House, London by Prince William, Duke of Cambridge, and later installed at Euston station near the then-presumed location of his grave.

[84] On 30 June 2019 the Royal Australian Navy ordered the construction of HMAS Flinders a Hunter-class frigate to be built by BAE Systems Australia in Osborne.