I'd find it more believable that the Portugese made it to Shark Bay WA or thereabouts then disappeared. Missing records are a bit like the dog ate my homework... it's too convenient. Perhaps the Vic mahogany ship sketches were drawn from the memory of others, like police identikit images. A parallel example is aboriginal recollections of Vic volcanoes; I think later arrivals implanted the idea and the prior inhabitants obliged with stories.

I'm amazed Abel Tasman walked 40 km through horizontal scrub to near Zeehan Tas, named after one of his ships. No trinkets but better documentation.

A secret map which "bears little resemblance to the shape of the east coast that we're well acquainted with today."

"...the lintel stone mentioned above – to McIntyre's great dismay – went missing."

Speaks volumes...

As interesting as this is? Australia was discovered and settled by other folks over 60,000 years ago. There were other waves of settlers who came in waves of migration a long ago as 12-14,000 years ago.

We were fortunate that the English got here before the French, established an English colony. Had the French not been outsmarted by a very astute Cook, this place could've become a French possession?

Given that possibility? The second world war, the defeat of the French by the Germans, who knows what that would have meant for the indigenous population?

I mean, we would've been seen by the master race, who slaughtered 6 million Jews, as vermin? Would have treated us we far less humanity or respect!? Than the invaders!?

This possibility should inform us that it's past time for a treaty, recognition and a truth and reconciliation outcome. A bill of irrevocable rights!

Once the pages of history are accurately recorded, based on proven factual information, not he said, she said humbug, we just might be able to get over ourselves and our alleged history!

Replete with colour coded infanticide, tribal wars/intertribal massacres, rape and worse. Like, say child sexual abuse as part of a clung to, primitive culture/elitist lawgivers.

Let's get it all out there rather than cherry-picked subjectively selected colour coded, (reverse apartied) atrocities?

Portuguese, Spanish, French, Indonesian, Timorese, What of it!?

That was then, a vastly different world that bears little if any resemblance to today's world.

The new invaders are pathogens carried here from the four corners of the globe, and completely indifferent to whomsoever they target for extermination!

Let's not limit the truth-telling to the last 200 years/white-based crimes/atrocities. Remembering the first wave of white settlement was as walking corpses in iron manacles.

Who wanted to be here with all the fervour and conviction of wanting a hole in the head. These then were the invaders who did to us what we'd already done to each other and worse, long before a man named Cook set foot on this land.
Alan B.

Dear Alan B,

You write; "Given that possibility? The second world war, the defeat of the French by the Germans, who knows what that would have meant for the indigenous population?"

Well the French ultimately gave up their colonies as did most of the other colonising nations. The record show the English tended to hold on to them and never leave. Australia, USA, New Zealand, Canada etc. The case could be made that the indigenous population would have fared markedly better.

As to a wave of imports 12 to 13,000 years ago it didn't happen. Studies on the indigenous Y chromosome show the following;

"The first complete sequences of the Y chromosomes of Aboriginal Australian men have revealed a deep indigenous genetic history tracing all the way back to the initial settlement of the continent 50 thousand years ago, according to a study published in the journal Current Biology today (25th February 2016).

The study by researchers from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and collaborators at La Trobe University in Melbourne and several other Australian institutes, challenges a previous theory that suggested an influx of people from India into Australia around 4-5 thousand years ago. This new DNA sequencing study focused on the Y chromosome, which is transmitted only from father to son, and found no support for such a prehistoric migration. The results instead show a long and independent genetic history in Australia."
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2016-02/wtsi-gr5022316.php

Steele it’s ok it’s just another lie from Alan, he has been outed for lying on numerous article posts he has made Recently.

Alan likes to think he knows all by posting long boring waffle that few people are interested in reading again and again.

Alan, I am still waiting for you to give evidence on your ‘space age’ lie detection equipment, perhaps you could oblige or is that just another lie amongst so many others?
Galen

It has also been argued, and as the Portuguese were the best European navigators and seafarers up to that time not unlikely, that the Portuguese were well aware of the existence of Brazil well prior to the treaty of Tordesillas.