Ambrosius Aurelius Theodosius Macrobius, [Mappa mundi], woodcut, in In Somnium Scipionis exposito (Venetiis [Venice] 1492), Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, Sydney, MRB/ Q878.9/M (Incunubula). Available online at itemID=853547&acmsid=0 (accessed 18 May 2010). 

... disciplines of history, politics, international relations, economics, geography and anthropology, which mutually quarantine Asian, Australian and Pacific Studies — though archae- ology and prehistoric linguistics are honourable exceptions to this rule, as is Oskar Spate’s magisterial ‘Oceanic’ vision which also embraced the Americas and East Asia. 3 This vast space has been occupied for a more or less immense period by modern human beings who named themselves and the places they dwelt in and knew of. 4 However, I limit my concern in this paper to a history of the thinking, naming and segmenting of that space, its places and its inhabitants as an integrated region of the globe. From such a global perspective, Terra Australis , the Pacific Ocean and Oceania were European inventions. Yet, from the end of the 13th century, when the Venetian Marco Polo and his relatives traversed the far western margins of the region, the empirical legacies of direct personal encounters and local knowledge began to infiltrate and complicate European theory and myth. Henceforth, the formulation of geographical and anthropological knowledge about the fifth part of the world would be located at the interface of unstable metropolitan discourses and often fraught regional experience. A particular concern here is to unpack relationships between, on the one hand, the profoundly ethnocentric but universalised deductions of savants in the metropoles; and, on the other hand, the uneasily cosmopolitan empirical logic of travellers and residents who had visited or lived in particular places, engaged with the inhabitants, and been exposed, often unwittingly, to local agency, lore, rumour and nomenclatures. The world outside the oikoumene , the more or less known and inhabited continental land mass of Europe, northern Africa and Asia, was the object of European fantasy or speculation for far longer than it has been actuality. 5 In the 6th century BC , the Pythagoreans deduced that the earth must be a sphere because this was the perfect, harmonious solid form. Two centuries later, Aristotle proposed a theoretical proof for a spherical earth with the corollary that vast antipodean land masses were needed in the south and the west to counterbalance the oikoumene : the southern antipodes was known as the Antichthon. Though long debated and contested, this concept was endorsed by the Roman philosopher Marcus Tullius Cicero in the 1st century BC and mapped by the Alexandrian geographer Claudius Ptolemaeus in the 2nd century AD (Figure 1). 6 Arguments for the sphericity of the earth and for the existence of inhabited antipodean lands were vehemently rejected on Scriptural grounds by most early Christian churchmen in favour of the ancient idea that the world was a disk surrounded by water. Early in the 5th century, Saint Augustine of Hippo notably ridiculed ‘the fable that there are Antipodes’ or ‘men on the opposite side of the earth’. He maintained that, even if it could be ‘scientifically demonstrated that the world is . . . spherical . . . , yet it does not follow that the other side of the earth is bare of water; nor . . . that it is peopled’; and that ‘it is too absurd to say’, in defiance of Scripture, that ‘that distant region’ could possibly be inhabited by descendants of the ‘one first man’. 7 The ecclesiastical dogma that all human beings were the posterity of Adam and that all must be able to receive the Gospel underpinned much medieval cosmography. However, the theory of the Antichthon was kept alive during the Middle Ages, notably in a long cycle of mappae mundi illustrating an evangelistic commentary on the Apocalypse by the 8th-century Spanish monk Beatus. The earliest known such map depicts a southern continent annotated as: ‘ Deserta terra vicina solida ardore incognita nobis ’ (‘a deserted neighbouring land, hardened by heat, unknown to us’). The phrase was inspired by the Etymologiarum of the 7th-century savant Saint Isidore of Seville who, in contrast to Augustine, took seriously the concept of a spherical earth ‘divided into three [known] parts’ and further hypothesised the existence of a ‘ quarta pars ’, a ‘fourth part across the Ocean’, ‘in the south’, which was ‘unknown to us because of the burning sun’ but was reputedly inhabited by the ‘fabulous Antipodes’. 9 The idea of an antipodean terra incognita took on new life during the 15th- century Renaissance with the publication of old maps in novel printed formats. So, on the mappa mundi produced for the 1482 edition of Ptolemy’s Cosmographia , a landlocked ‘Indian Sea’ is enclosed to the south by ‘ terra incognita ’ (Figure 1). In 1483, a circular zonal world map by Augustine’s contemporary, the 5th-century Neoplatonist Ambrosius Aurelius Theodosius Macrobius, appeared in a printed edition of his very popular commentary on Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis . Macrobius’s map featured a great southern land mass labelled ‘ Antipodvm, nobis, incognita ’ (‘the Antipodes unknown to us’) (Figure 2). 10 In 1507, in Cosmographiae introdvctio , the German geographer Martin Waldseemu ̈ ller revolu- tionised contemporary understandings of the globe by maintaining that recent explorations — specifically those of the Florentine Amerigo Vespucci in 1501–2 — had disclosed the existence of a ‘ quarta orbis pars ’ (‘fourth part of the world’). He further proposed that, since Vespucci had ‘ inuenta ’ (‘discovered’ or ‘conceived’) the quarta pars , it should be called ‘America’. 12 Waldseemu ̈ ller duly included the neologism on two woodcut world maps published in conjunction with his text, a small one in gores meant to be used as a globe and a huge flat projection in 12 separate sheets. 13 The maps were so popular that Waldseemu ̈ ller’s later attempts to withdraw the name America, apparently on the grounds that Vespucci had not been the true discoverer of the quarta pars , failed completely. 14 With the designation of America as the quarta pars , the Antichthon could logically become the fifth continent or fifth part of the world to those who believed in it. A striking example of the new fivefold division of the continents appears on the title page of the first modern world atlas, the Dutchman Abraham Ortelius’s Theatrvm orbis terrarvm (Figure 3). The continents are represented by five female figures, symbolically attired and equipped and arrayed about a massive plinth: at the top, Christian Europe is enthroned; on the flanks stand Asia and Africa; at the base reclines ferocious, naked America, bearing weapons and a severed human head, beside the small bust of a demure Magellanica with a flame beneath her breast symbolising Tierra del Fuego, the ‘land of fire’ seen and named by Ferdinand Magellan in 1520 on the left of the strait that bears his name. 15 Emergent from a critical node of geographical thinking and publishing at the Gymnasium Vosagense in Saint-Die ́ in Lorraine, Waldseemu ̈ ller’s great map bore marked imprints of local knowledge acquired by practical mariners, including Vespucci along the South American coast and Portuguese travellers in Africa and India. On the basis of the up-to-date navigational information recorded in coastal portolan charts, Waldseemu ̈ ller opened Ptolemy’s landlocked Indian Ocean to the east and west and thereby made redundant his terra incognita in the south. 16 But this geographical parsimony was not emulated by many other contemporary cartographers who enthusiastically rehearsed the classical theory of a necessary southern counterweight to the great northern land masses. 17 Ironically, their spur was pragmatic: the widespread conviction that Tierra del Fuego formed the northern tip of a southern continent. Yet survivors of Magellan’s voyage told Maximilian Transylvanus, secretary to the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, that they thought they had heard the roar of the sea ‘on a still farther coast’ beyond Tierra del Fuego. Transylvanus’s letter reporting his interview with the circumnavigators was published in 1523, along with a now lost globe, but failed to discourage cartographic fantasising about a southern continent. 18 Well before this, from 1511, the Portuguese moving southeast from India had captured Malacca, on the west coast of the Malay Peninsula, made contact with the Moluccas or Spice Islands, near the western edge of Oceania, and perhaps seen the as yet unnamed island of New Guinea. In 1513, half a world away, local guides led the Spaniard Vasco Nu ́n ̃ ez de Balboa across the isthmus at Darien (in modern Panama) to show him a great sea to the south, which he named el Mar del Sur . In November 1520, Magellan emerged into what he called the Mare Pacificum but saw only one inhabited island (Guam in modern Micronesia) 19 during an agonising transoceanic passage to the archipelago later called the Philippines, where he was killed. It would take three centuries for Magellan’s Pacific Ocean definitively to supplant Balboa’s South Sea. 20 In the wake of Magellan’s voyage, in 1523–24, the Nuremberg mathematician and astronomer Johann Scho ̈ ner produced a globe in gores depicting a huge Antarctic continent separated from South America by a narrow strait. Part of the continent is named ‘ Terra Avstralis ’ and optimistically labelled ‘ recenter inventa at nondvm plene cognita ’ (‘recently discovered but not yet fully known)’. The French mathematician Oronce Fine rehearsed the legend in his cordiform hemispheric world map of 1531, which named the entire southern continent ‘ Terra Avstralis ’. 21 In his great mappa mundi of 1569, the Flemish cartographer Gerard Mercator famously promoted the idea of a vast ‘ Pars continentis avstralis ’ (‘southern continental region’). This map shows a large square island hovering above the Pars continentis australis and inscribed: ‘New Guinea which the Florentine Andrea Corsali appears to name Terra de Piccinacoli ’ (‘Land of the little people’); and ‘we are as yet ignorant whether it is an island or part of the ...