Description
The Terra Australis exhibition, which I feel privileged to introduce, spans two of the greatest periods in the intellec tual and aesthetic development of Western culture and civi- lisation, the Renaissance of the sixteenth century and the Enlightenment of the eighteenth, as reflected in the vast stores of written, graphic and cartographic material stem- ming from the maritime discoveries of the times. Both these ages were ages of exploration of both humanity's external terrestrial environment and its internal psychological springs of action. The exhibition offers a fascinating panorama of three centuries of daring voyaging, acute observation, and vivid reporting, in words and images, of newly discovered seas, lands, and peoples.
The central theme is the complex process by which a vast unknown, Terra Australis, was reduced to a smaller Aus- tralia, no longer hypothetical but known. For two centuries the concept of Terra Australis Incognita exercised a potent hold on the imaginations of seamen and scholars, men of action and men of thought. The origins of the hypothesis go back to classical visions of an Utopian Southland; in the sixteenth century it was given a positive shape in maps such as those of Mercator, depicting with more or less detail and fantasy a great continent sweeping up from Tierra del Fuego to the neighbourhood of New Guinea, and running down again to south of the Cape of Good Hope. Since the known area of dry land in the northern hemisphere was over three times that in the southern, it was thought that the south must have an unknown compensating landmass to maintain the balance of the globe.
