Of course, these three categories overlapped in various ways. Mawer’s book points out how – in this perennial quest for the unknown southern land – fact and fiction intermingled in often disarming ways, something exemplified by Matthew Flinders’s claim that he was originally ‘induced to go to sea against the wishes of my friends, from reading Robinson Crusoe’. Mawer’s own intellectual base, however, is the world of maps; and it is here that the apparatus of his work appears to be grounded most solidly, paying tribute for example to R.H. Major, a nineteenth-century Keeper of Maps in the British Museum, who rediscovered some of the seventeenth-century maps by Manuel Godinho de Erédia that are discussed in this book’s fourth chapter. Mawer is actually very good on the work of Erédia, describing in compelling detail how the Portuguese savant’s efforts, in his Declaration of Malacca (1613), to reconcile traveller’s accounts from Marco Polo in the thirteenth century with the latest information received from Java showed ‘the gaps in Portuguese knowledge of the south at that time’, with Mawer aptly suggesting how the significance of Erédia’s efforts to discover ‘Meridional India’ lay in their ‘failure’. The author skilfully negotiates here the variable and quickly changing dimensions of cartographic knowledge associated at this time with Sumatran kingdoms and other islands of the Far East. Indeed, Incognita itself is well illustrated with maps and other visual emblems, and in general it encompasses a treasure trove of useful and, at times, fascinating information.

‘Mawer’s book points out how – in this perennial quest for the unknown southern land – fact and fiction intermingled in often disarming ways’

This book is published by Australian Scholarly Publishing, but quite how ‘scholarly’ it is, in a strict sense, is another matter. The author’s special expertise in cartography does not always appear to be matched by an equal facility in Western thought and culture more generally, and this gives the book a somewhat uneven quality. In particular, Mawer is oddly dismissive about what he calls the ‘mental lumber’ of European mythology, castigating Plato’s myth of the sunken island of Atlantis as a waste of good trees (‘On average, a new book on the subject has appeared every 14 months since his time’), and being equally rude about what he calls the ‘pure Pythonism’ of Sir Thomas More’s utopian endeavours; in fact, the final subheading in Incognita’s first chapter is entitled ‘The Nonsense of Utopia’. This kind of antipathy can be explained by Mawer’s distinct preference for the earthbound reality of nautical craft over the fantastic hypothesising of philosophers, a trait shared by old sea dogs such as Joseph Conrad, who was similarly sceptical in a 1924 essay about how ‘the scheme of the Terra Australis Incognita’ induced ‘armchair geographers’ to ‘paint the most fanciful variants of their pet theory of a great southern continent’.

Given this decided intellectual preference for ‘the scientific’ over ‘the supernatural’ or ‘the speculative’, it is perhaps not surprising that Mawer’s approach should find itself on more solid ground in the second half of this study, where he describes the voyages of Bougainville, Samuel Wallis, James Cook, and others. Mawer is better on the naval chronicles of antipodean discovery than on its philosophical theory, with his discussion of Abel Tasman, for instance, being more concerned with biographical details – whether Tasman was commanding the voyage, or what was his monthly salary – than with the more abstract intellectual or political contexts of Tasman’s enterprise. True to his empiricist proclivities, Mawer cites with approbation Cook’s scorn for Alexander Dalrymple’s suggestion that there needed to be a southern continent to counterpoise the northern hemisphere and ‘maintain the equilibrium necessary for the earth’s motion’, a theory Cook dismissed as ‘a most childish argument’. Mawer mentions at one point how Flinders ‘had been educated in the James Cook school of methodical and sceptical exploration’, and this is a modus operandi that he also clearly favours.

‘Mawer cites with approbation Cook’s scorn for Alexander Dalrymple’s suggestion that there needed to be a southern continent’

One of the strengths of this book is that it covers so much ground, from Dante’s representation of the antipodes in the ‘Purgatorio’ section of the Divine Comedy, through to the voyages of Francis Drake, and then on to accounts of southern voyages from Daniel Defoe, Charles Wilkes, and others, before finishing up with Douglas Mawson’s expeditions to Antarctica in the first decade of the twentieth century. The cost of this breadth, however, is a certain loss of depth, and though fascinating characters such as John Cleves Symmes and Jeremiah Reynolds make brief appearances, the academic sources cited on them are not entirely up to date; in particular, Hester Blum’s recent work on Symmes would have repaid critical scrutiny. By comparison with Paul Longley Arthur’s Virtual Voyages: Travel Writing and the Antipodes 1605–1837 (2010), Mawer’s book is relatively light on scholarship, even though it is more appealing in terms of its general readability and accessibility to a wider audience. At some points, indeed, the style of Mawer’s narrative seems, for better or worse, more like a television documentary than an academic treatise. Turning his attention to the sixteenth century, for example, he writes: ‘Francis Drake was a pirate, but he was Elizabeth’s pirate. The Queen and the commoner shared more than red hair and avarice; they were both risk-takers on an heroic scale.’

Nevertheless, this is a fine work of popular history, which, true to its provenance in the various public events associated with the ‘Australia on the Map’ program of 2006, has something of the allure of an interesting museum exhibition. Readers can, as it were, tour the cultural exhibits, paying particular attention to the unfamiliar features that catch their eye, and from among this accumulation of information, they are almost bound to be attracted and intrigued by something that they did not already know.