FANS of television's The Ship, BBC2's recreation of the voyage of discovery by the 21st century crew of the replica Whitby barque, Endeavour, recreating the 1768 journey of Captain James Cook, could well find more than enough to fascinate them in this book.

Cook's three-year journey was to observe an eclipse and to discover an uncharted continent. Author Vanessa Collingridge's journey was to uncover the passions that drove Cook farther than any other man of his time. En-route however, she discovered more than she bargained for.

Ms Collingridge, TV journalist and geographer, has a passion for explorers, and a chance discovery in a library led her to a very personal introduction to a distant, dead relative, George Collingridge, who had made Australia his home 100 or so years ago. He, too, was a geographer and journalist with a passion for discovery, and also with an interest in Cook.

But what he uncovered in his own explorations of the British captain was to prove a bombshell for British academics and historians. He wrote that Cook did not discover Australia, it was the Portuguese, a couple of hundred years earlier.

George Collingridge had come across a set of beautiful 16th-century maps in Australia showing a mysterious continent called Java la Grande, a continent with place names in Portuguese, French and Spanish, and clearly in the place where Australia is now mapped.

This was not the sort of news that the British establishment wanted to hear, especially when Captain Cook, the greatest explorer of all time, had landed there and claimed much of it in the name of King George.

George Collingridge found himself a most unpopular figure both here and in Australia, his views ridiculed and attacked at every opportunity. Right up to his death in 1931, George Collingridge never once gave up the fight to teach Australians what he believed to be the truth about their country.

The argument with its rivalries and prejudices continue to this day... news of a European lead weight, found buried deep in sand on Queensland's Fraser Island, an island that is clearly shown on the Java la Grande map, and which has been scientifically dated to between AD1410 and 1630, took 23 years to be published because the scientists' conclusions were not deemed "appropriate" and did not fit with the version of history that had been accepted as fact.

But, whether it was the British, Portuguese, French or Spanish who landed in Australia, the first true discoverers were the Aborigines, with skeletons found there going back at least 60,000 years.

Updated: 10:49 Wednesday, November 06, 2002