Australia was named before it was discovered. Ancient geographers had supposed that land in the north must be balanced by land in the south — Aristotle had written, “there must be a region bearing the same relation to the southern pole as the place we live in bears to our pole” — and Romans told legends of a Terra Australis Incognita, an “unknown land of the South.” While humans had been living there for millennia, no Roman or Indian or Chinese had actually known there was land there!
In 1814 the British explorer Matthew Flinders suggested applying the speculative name, Terra Australis, to the actual continent which was relatively recently “discovered.” And in a footnote he wrote, “Had I permitted myself any innovation on the original term, it would have been to convert it to AUSTRALIA; as being more agreeable to the ear, and an assimilation to the names of the other great portions of the earth.”
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