A Voyage to Terra Australis

December 1802, Gulf of Carpentaria. The master and the carpenter have given their verdict: the Investigator's hull is rotten and will hardly last more than six months of fair weather. Matthew Flinders nonetheless decides to continue surveying these coasts, which Dutch charts sketch only in broad strokes.

He fills his holds with turtles on a sandy island, explores Sir Edward Pellew's group, discovers that a cape shown on the charts is only an island, sails around Groote Eylandt and, in the caves of Chasm Island, gazes on paintings left by Aboriginal people. At Blue-mud Bay an encounter goes badly: an officer returns pierced with spears. At Caledon Bay a boy named Woga is kept on board. Then, off Arnhem Land, six praus appear from Macassar, whose crews fish for trepang on these shores every season.

After a stop at Coupang, on the island of Timor, the long voyage home begins, by Cape Leeuwin and Bass Strait, with a crew thinned by dysentery. Will the ship reach Port Jackson, and what will then remain of the great voyage of discovery?

The journal of a hydrographer who stakes his mission against time, and one of the very first European accounts of contacts between northern Australia and the Malay world.