Origin of the word ‘Australia’: Kel Richards

Sky News host Kel Richards talks about the origin of the word ‘Australia’ and the famous figures who coined the country’s name.

“Long before anything was discovered in the Southern Hemisphere, there was this kind of a ‘imaginary land’ below the equator in the Southern Hemisphere which was given the Latin name of Terra-Australis,” he told Peta Credlin.

“But it was Anglicised into Australia, and that word I am told even appears on Mercator’s famous map in 1538.

“The man who actually applied it to this continent was Matthew Flinders, he did the circumnavigation around Australia – 1801 to 1803 … the guy who picked it up and popularised it was Lachlan Macquarie.”