im writing a report in school about who i think discovered australia. i was learning about this in a previous school and am sure that in some info we were given, it said that aborigines were here when he arrived. please help!
The aboriginals were all over Australia before Captain Cook arrived. They had been here for at least 60,000 years!
But Cook did NOT discover Australia. There were plenty of others had found Australia before Cook came along. The first European to discover Australia was Willem Jansoon a Dutchman who came along more than 100 years before Cook. As well as the Dutch the Spanish and Portuguese landed and mapped parts of the coastline as well. When Cook set foot on Australian soil the continent was actually considered Dutch territory and was called New Holland. He landed and claimed the east coast for Britain and named it New South Wales. Soon after the British decided they might as well expand their claim to include the rest of the continent (on the grounds that the Dutch didn't have any actual settlements there) so the whole continent became known as New South Wales and many years later Australia.