Outlines
While James Cook's track along Australia's east coast more or less completed the continent's outline, significant gaps remained.
Cook's second and third voyages removed remaining questions about a temperate Terra Australis Incognita. Any southern continent could only lie below the Antarctic Circle.
At the same time, Cook's passages through Polynesia added many new locations for Europeans to investigate.
The ninety-odd years between Cook's track along the east coast and the first settlers' arrival in The North saw extensive exploratory activity around Australia's coastline as French and English navigators dealt with unanswered questions.
Inquisitive Frenchmen deals with the former. Relevant sections of Adding Detail and the Outlines booklet cover the British response after the decision to establish a penal colony at Botany Bay. That was probably never a mere dumping ground for convicts.
That decision seems to have been made in a hurry, more than likely intended to reinforce British claims to the eastern seaboard.
At the very least, Botany Bay would become a self-supporting location where Britain's criminal classes could be safely exiled. The colony might also deliver any number of benefits.
So, for thirty years after 1788, British activity around Australia's coast focussed on reinforcing the territorial claim, keeping the Frenchmen out and seeking the river system that would deliver access to the continent's interior.
After 1820 as sheep entered the equation and squatters took up extensive tracts of land regardless of government regulations, the blank spaces on maps of the continent's southeast corner slowly disappeared.
Ludwig Leichhardt's expedition to Port Essington delivered tempting pastoral prospects in the Upper Burdekin.
Edmund Kennedy's journey from Rockingham Bay to the tip of Cape York produced less. Still, it provided a degree of pathos to match the sorry saga of Burke and Wills.
Meanwhile, the rest of The North remained as a slightly more detailed outline.
