In the Jubilee History of Queensland,1 one reads “there are those who credit the discovery of Australia to the time of Alexander the Great, 327 B.C….. There can be little doubt that when Strabo wrote fifty years before Christ, and Pliny in the latter part of the first century, and Ptolemy [Claudius Ptolemaeus] in the second, ‘of a land of beauty and bounty stretching far to the south of India beyond the equator to an unknown distance’ — they…doubtless told the story of some early explorers who…beheld this land. Indeed, there is scarcely a century to be found in which some mention has not been made of this great Southern Land which, in the language of Agathemerus of the third century, ‘was the greatest island in the World.'” Professor F.L.W. Wood, in his well-known Concise History of Australia2 indicates that already in Pre-Christian times the Greeks presumed there might well be a great Southern Continent. Perhaps then, suggests Wood, some descendants of Adam might have travelled as far as the Antipodes and flourished there. Thus too thought Albert the Great (1193-1280) and also even Roger Bacon (1214-1294).
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