The name
Australia has been applied to two continents. Originally, it was applied to the south polar continent, or sixth continent, now known as
Antarctica. The name is a shortened form of which was one of the names given to the imagined (but undiscovered) land mass that was thought to surround the south pole. The earliest known use of the name in
Latin was in 1545, when the word appears in a woodcut illustration of the globe titled
Sphere of the Winds contained in an astrological textbook published in
Frankfurt. In the nineteenth century, the name
Australia was re-assigned to
New Holland, the fifth continent. Thereafter, the south polar continent remained nameless for some eighty years until the new name of
Antarctica was coined. A () appeared on
world maps from the 15th century, although it was not based on any actual surveying of such a landmass but rather on the hypothesis that continents in the
Northern Hemisphere should be balanced by land in the
south. This theory of balancing land is on record as early as the 5th century on maps by
Macrobius. The earliest recorded use of the word
Australia in English was in 1625 in "A note of Australia del Espíritu Santo, written by Sir Richard Hakluyt", published by
Samuel Purchas in
Hakluytus Posthumus, a variation of the original Spanish name () coined by navigator
Pedro Fernandes de Queirós in 1606 for the largest island of
Vanuatu, believing his expedition had reached
Terra Australis. This is a rare combination of terms
Austral and
Austria, the latter in honour of the
Habsburg dynasty that ruled Spain at the time. The Dutch adjectival form was used in a Dutch book in
Batavia (now
Jakarta) in 1638, to refer to the newly discovered lands to the south.
Australia was later used in a 1693 translation of , a 1676 French novel by
Gabriel de Foigny, under the pen-name Jacques Sadeur. Referring to the entire South Pacific region,
Alexander Dalrymple used it in
An Historical Collection of Voyages and Discoveries in the South Pacific Ocean in 1771. The name Australia was specifically applied to the continent for the first time in 1794, and
James Wilson including it on a 1799 chart. The name
Australia was popularised by the explorer
Matthew Flinders, who pushed for it to be formally adopted as early as 1804. When preparing his manuscript and charts for his 1814
A Voyage to Terra Australis, he was persuaded by his patron,
Joseph Banks, to use the term
Terra Australis as this was the name most familiar to the public. Flinders did so, and published the following rationale: In the footnote to this, Flinders wrote: In the first volume of
A Voyage to Terra Australis this is the only occurrence of
Australia as a single word, although Flinders also recounts
Australia del Espiritu Santo, and in Appendix III found in the second volume,
Robert Brown's
General remarks, geographical and systematical, on the botany of Terra Australis, Brown makes use of the adjectival form
Australian throughoutthe first known use of that form. Despite popular conception, the book was not instrumental in the adoption of the name; rather, the name became gradually accepted over the subsequent ten years. The first time that the name
Australia appears to have been officially used was in a despatch to Lord Bathurst of 4 April 1817 in which Governor
Lachlan Macquarie acknowledges the receipt of Flinders' charts of Australia. On 12 December 1817, Macquarie recommended to the Colonial Office that it be formally adopted. In 1824, the Admiralty agreed that the continent should be known officially as
Australia.
Ulimaroa was a name given to Australia by the
Swedish geographer and
cartographer Daniel Djurberg in 1776. Djurberg adapted the name from
Olhemaroa, a
Māori word found in
Hawkesworth's edition of
Captain James Cook and
Sir Joseph Banks' journals which is thought to have been a misunderstood translationthe Māori were actually referring to
Grand Terre, the largest island of
New Caledonia. Djurberg believed the name meant something like "big red land", whereas modern linguists believe it meant "long arm" (or hand)echoing the geography of Grand Terre. The spurious name continued to be reproduced on certain European maps, particularly some Austrian,
Czech, German and
Swedish maps, until around 1820, including in
Carl Almqvist's 1817 novel (Stockholm, 1817). Nowadays, in Māori the term for Australia is . ==The Commonwealth of Australia==