According to our national anthem Australia is a wide brown land “girt“, that is gird or encircled, by sea. Whales migrate up and down the East and west coasts, breeding in the tropics and returning to Antarctica, helped and hindered by the currents shown on this map.

The Timor Sea lies to the North. Some 40,000 years ago, or perhaps even 70,000 years ago, those we now call Aborigines crossed to Australia on bamboo rafts. Sea levels then were so low that the journey has been re-enacted in 12 hours. Much later when William Dampier reached our north coast the Dutch, while colonising Jakarta, had already decided that Australia was uninhabitable. There was fresh water, huge quantities of it, but it fell in a narrow season. As the poet later said “the creeks are dry or ten feet high”. Dampier wisely stuck to piracy on the high seas, and only the Dutch presence was recorded in aboriginal rock paintings: a sailing boat and a white man smoking a pipe. Further north lies the China Sea and an ancient coin suggests that one of China’s huge ocean-going junks may have dropped in near Darwin.

The Great Southern Ocean flanks the rugged South coast. . Here also explorers were discouraged, this time by high, beach-less granite cliffs guarded by predatory White Pointer sharks. Further south lies Antarctica from which the Humpback and Southern Right Whales pass by on their way north.

The Indian Ocean. On the west coast an arid, red desert rolls on and on from the centre until it falls off a cliff into the Indian Ocean. Let us, in our imagination, now go west, over and beyond the curving horizon, to find out how and why these blunt-bowed square -rigged hulks bothered to heave their way from Europe to risk wreckage on such hostile shores. It was Vasco da Gama who showed, in 1611, that the Orient could be reached by ship round the Cape of Good Hope instead of overland through Asia. The Dutch, Portuguese and French empires looked for water, found none and, if they were lucky to survive, went home. Those who were shipwrecked on the Abrolhos Islands slaughtered each other over a few casks of water. Those who got to the mainland found only underground rivers, wide but dry, and perished. The names they gave, Geographe Bay, Cape Naturaliste, the Leeuwin current, Dirk Hartog island, Francois Peron, Baron Hamelin, Esperance, Admiral Bruny d’Entrecasteuax, indicate the countries that, coming the wrong way, tried, failed and went home. Only the seeds of the Boab tree, floating from Madagascar, found fertile soil and spread across the land.

The Pacific Ocean. The inland bulk of Australia remains a harsh, red desert, softened where it slopes up eastwards to the great Dividing Range, and wet where its rivers then drop down to the Pacific, giving Sydney twice the rainfall of  London. And so the British Empire dropped anchor here, found water and pastoral lands, and stayed on. There have been at least two re-enactments of large-scale trans-Pacific migrations. The first, the KonTiki expedition from Chile to New Zealand, showed that a balsa wood raft could make the journey, though not that it actually happened that way. The second, in 2010, on 22 metre twin-masted canoes, demonstrated the Polynesian migration to New Zealand, Hawaii and Easter Island some 1000 years ago. Australian aborigines did reach Tasmania, but that was when there was a land bridge. Very little was known about the Pacific ocean currents until a Taiwanese freighter sank and 35,000 pairs of ice hockey gloves floated all over the Pacific. Where they washed ashore gave us the first clear map of the system of currents.