For someone who dedicated his life to finding, navigating and mapping things, it was unfortunate that Matthew Flinders’ body was lost for the better part of 200 years.
Archaeologists announced in 2019 they had rediscovered the grave of the first man known to have circumnavigated Australia, while digging under a park behind London’s Euston station during excavations for the HS2 high-speed rail line.
“We were very lucky that Capt Flinders had a breastplate made of lead, meaning it would not have corroded,” said HS2’s head of heritage, Helen Wass. The plate on his coffin read: “Capt Matthew Flinders RN. Died 19 July, 1814. Aged 40 Years.”
On Saturday Flinders’ remains will be taken to his Lincolnshire village home, Donington, and reinterred.
The captain, a flute-playing, cat-loving global explorer, achieved historic deeds, including the 1802-03 circumnavigation in HMS Investigator, despite suffering shipwrecks, illness and a fatally disobedient crew.
He was separated from his wife for almost a decade and detained in Mauritius for more than six years. He died just a day after his book, A Voyage to Terra Australis, was published.
But amid misfortune Flinders did have one huge stroke of luck – the presence on the Investigator of the Garigal man Bungaree (also known as Bongaree), who acted as liaison with First Nations people as they sailed around the continent.
Bungaree played a crucial diplomatic role, despite not speaking the same language as most of those he came across.
Flinders hailed the “modesty and forbearance” and “good disposition and manly conduct” of a “worthy and brave man”, whom he often called a friend.
Bungaree’s bravery
Gillian Dooley, a historian and the author of The First Wave: Exploring Early Coastal Contact History in Australia, is from Flinders’ namesake university in South Australia. She has studied first contact between explorers (rather than settlers) and First Nations people.
Dooley says while Flinders was sometimes patronising towards Bungaree, he respected him and his knowledge.
“Bungaree was sent naked, unarmed on shore to all these groups around the coast who were completely different people … I think he was an incredibly brave man to take that on, to be the ambassador,” she says.
She edited Flinders’ private journal, and found him “really thoughtful, intelligent, scientific but also artistic, a bit of a romantic man of his time”. She has written on what she calls “the limits of empathy”.
“He’s always struck me as someone who has empathy, and who treats other human beings with a certain respect,” Dooley says from the UK, where she will attend the reburial. She says while he could be “patronising, a bit condescending”, he recognised the humanity of First Nations people – unlike others of his time.
“He never thought ‘we don’t have a right to land here’ but he did think ‘we are on their land’,” she says.
“He could imagine, empathetically, being those people, which was I think quite unusual for someone in his situation. But there are limits to that, being of his time.”
Dooley describes a “really nasty incident” at Blue Mud Bay on the east coast of Arnhem Land.
Flinders had told his crew not to fight back or shoot if there were any clashes with the local Aboriginal people.
“One of his crew members was speared, not fatally, but speared,” Dooley says. “And quite against the orders that Flinders gave, some of his crew pursued the guy who did it and shot him.
“The accounts are that Flinders was appalled by this and deeply upset but he didn’t actually punish anyone for it.”
Tim Flannery, who edited Terra Australis: Matthew Flinders’ Great Adventures in the Circumnavigation of Australia, says one of the crew had drawn a picture of the body which showed he had been shot from behind.
“A really tragic drawing,” he says.
Flinders was also accompanied on the voyage by his adored cat, Trim. In a long tribute essay to Trim, Flinders described him as a “good-natured purring animal” with a “superior intelligence” and a tail that could bristle out to a “fearful size”.
“Trim’s robe was a clear jet black, with the exception of his four feet, which seemed to have been dipped in snow; and his under lip, which rivalled them in whiteness; he had also a white star on his breast, and it seemed as if nature had designed him for the prince and model of his race,” Flinders wrote.
Flannery says Bungaree and Trim, who formed an “intimate acquaintance”, were Flinders’ only true companions on the ship.
“A captain’s job is a very lonely job,” he says. “Everyone has to treat you with deference. You have no friends. You have ultimate responsibility for everything.”
Tracey Howie, a descendant of Bungaree and a Garigal woman from the New South Wales Central Coast, points out that while Trim features in some statues of Flinders, including a noted one on Macquarie St in Sydney, Bungaree does not.
“Even up on the Central Coast, in Bungaree’s traditional country, we have a really high ridge line there called Rumbalara. On that hill is another statue of Flinders and not of Bungaree,” she says.
“The cat [is remembered] but no statue of the person who saved their arse.”
Bungaree and Flinders had “quite a good relationship”, Howie says.
“Flinders had quite a lot of respect for him. He was sent there because he was so highly respected.”
‘Pretty rotten boats’
Flannery says high on Flinders’ priority list while exploring Australia was finding a much-speculated-about inland sea.
Off South Australia he crossed paths with the French explorer Nicolas Baudin, at a place that would come to be called Encounter Bay.
“He was distracted at the critical moment,” Flannery says, “and missed the Murray mouth” – which would have led to the most significant internal body of water on the continent.
Flannery says Flinders was a “saltwater person” who was comfortable at sea despite encountering some “pretty rotten boats”.
The Investigator eventually rotted beneath Flinders’ feet. Trying to return to England as a passenger he was shipwrecked in HMS Porpoise off the coast of Queensland, then boarded another barely seaworthy vessel, HMS Cumberland, which had to put in to the French territory of Mauritius in December 1803, with Flinders unaware that England and France were once again at war.
He was arrested and held until 1810, distracting himself through the long years by playing the flute.
Flinders finally made it back to England in October 1810 but died only four years later, possibly as a result of having caught gonorrhoea as an 18-year-old in Tahiti.
Jane Pearson has lobbied for years to bring Flinders home. She says about 80 people from Australia will be among 400 guests at Saturday’s ceremony, with about 10 from Mauritius.
The governor of South Australia, Frances Adamson, will be present when Flinders is buried under the floor of St Mary and the Holy Rood in Donington.
“We just thought, where else was he going to go? It had to be here,” Pearson said.
On Friday Pearson told the ABC the breastplate from Flinders’ coffin would be returned to Australia. “It’s a loan from the family, I think a permanent loan,” she said.
“I think the family thought it was an appropriate thing to do to reflect that interest [from Australians] and give them something to show of the Flinders interest in South Australia still.”
A rare Australian Wollemi pine has been planted in the churchyard and events will include an 18-gun salute, a parade, fairground rides, a guard of honour, a church service and fireworks.
“I do think he’s one of the great people in Australian history that we can all be proud of, whether you’re Indigenous or not,” Flannery says.
Dooley says: “One thing I try to do … is to try to make him a real person.
“Nobody’s just a hero.”
• This article was amended on 13 July 2024. A statue depicting Matthew Flinders with his cat in Sydney is located on Macquarie St, not Mitchell St.
