In the fever of bicentennial celebrations of Flinders’ circumnavigation of Australia, thousands of words have been written and dozens of new books have appeared. The South Australian events and publications alone celebrating the encounter between Flinders and Baudin have almost reached plague proportions. However, Miriam Estensen’s Life of Matthew Flinders is the first full-blown biography of Flinders since Geoffrey Ingleton’s Matthew Flinders: Navigator and Chartmaker (1986), a deluxe volume not intended for the mass market. A paperback edition of Ernest Scott’s 1914 biography recently appeared, but new sources have become available since then and it is certainly time for a fresh assessment of Flinders’ achievements and character based on all the available evidence we now have.
The Life of Matthew Flinders by Miriam Estensen
Allen & Unwin, $59.95 hb, 554pp
The Navigators: The Great Race between Matthew Flinders and Nicolas Baudin for the North-South Passage through Australia by Klaus Toft
Duffy & Snellgrove, $19.95 pb, 364pp
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