Placing Tasmania on the map was a drawn-out affair. Although the island had been inhabited for tens of thousands of years by the Tasmanian Aboriginal people (who call it lutruwita), it was not until after Abel Tasman’s voyage of 1642/43 that Van Diemen’s land – or Anthoonij van Diemenslandt, as it was named by him – was added to European maps.

The ‘Polus Antarcticus’ map by Hondius was an important and popular polar-centric map in the mid 1600s, and Tasman’s charting and his name for the island were added to the 1641 original in this 1680 edition by Frederick de Wit.

European imagining of a ‘Great Southern Land’ dates back to the Greek philosopher, Aristotle, who proposed a continent in the south to balance the known land masses in the northern hemisphere. He introduced the notion of Terra Australis Incognita, Latin for ‘the unknown land of the south’ The idea was further developed by Ptolemy, whose maps postulated that Africa extended all the way south. The words, Terra Australis Incognita, began to appear on maps between the 15th and 18th centuries.

The name ‘Tasmania’ gradually grew in popular usage from early on after the European invasion of the island in 1801, with the naturalist Robert Brown naming a plant, Tasmannia lanceolata in 1803/04. The first published use of Tasmania as the name for the island was on a map, ‘An Elegant Imperial Sheet Atlas’, published in 1808 by Laurie and Whittle, London.