Great Southern Land

The first time that Australia appears to have been officially used was in April 1817, when Governor Lachlan Macquarie acknowledged the receipt of Flinders’

charts of Australia from Lord Bathurst.[40] In December 1817, Macquarie recommended to the Colonial Office that it be formally adopted.[41] In 1824,

the Admiralty agreed that the continent should be known officially by that name.[42] The first official published use of the new name came with the publication in 1830 of The Australia Directory by the Hydrographic Office.[43]

Colloquial names for Australia include “Oz” and “the Land Down Under” (usually shortened to just “Down Under”). Other epithets include “the

Great Southern Land”, “the Lucky Country”, “the Sunburnt Country”, and “the Wide Brown Land”. The latter two both derive from Dorothea Mackellar’s 1908 poem “My Country”.[44]