The Several 'Discoveries' of Sydney's Georges River: Precursors to the 'Tom Thumb' Expedition

Abstract

For many years Bass and Flinders' 1795 voyage up the Georges River in the 'Tom Thumb' was held up as the exemplar of young men in explorer and adventure mode. It was often taught as such as one of the first history lessons in NSW primary schools. Even within a few years of the voyage its memory had become sanctified: a relic of the 'Tom Thumb' was offered to the French explorer Baudin in 1802. Bass and Flinders had already become legendary, approaching Cook's stature by a similar mixture of service, scientific achievement and final tragedy. Surprisingly, however, a closer reading of the First Fleet diarists and maps indicate that much of the Georges River had been explored, and at least some of its fifty kilometres of tidewater channels fairly accurately charted, long before the 'Tom Thumb' voyage. Some of this detailed work had been done by Hunter, the very Governor who sent Bass and Flinders on their expedition. What seemed to mark the 1795 'Tom Thumb' voyage in people's minds was that the river had been named. Prior to its naming, the Georges River existed in the European mind only as part of an extended Botany Bay, usually referred to as 'the South West Arm', 'the west river', or 'the head of the Bay', distinguishing it from the 'north east arm' (the Cooks River; see Map 1). The land in between these two inlets was simply referred to as 'the Peninsula', at least in Tench's account. This vagueness in designation has concealed, even to most modern historians, just how far early interlopers had penetrated up what we now call the Georges River, and its environs.