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Matthew Flinders (Archived)

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Greetings forum from the UK.

Our village is the birthplace of Matthew Flinders. (Donington -Spalding - Lincolnshire)

Here is his statue in our Market Place - We are looking to link up with Australian Towns that have a history link with Matthew.

http://www.i5.photobucket.com/albums/y169/ctabuk/CTABUK002.jpg

Thanks David

If you don't get what you want - you'd better hope you want what you get!

Posted By ctabuk on Tuesday 13th June 2006 @ 19:35:00

Updated : Monday 9th October 2006 @ 20:40:00 | Words : 61 | Views : 284 | Comments : 1

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1).

I've recently been watching a series on Australia TV on Flinders and Bass and the French explorer in the years 1798 to 1803. I find, as I get old--and I am now 62--I like to compare my own life with the lives of explorers that I read about and see & hear about in the electronic media. My life possesses a far diffeent kind of adventurousness. The following prose-poem explores this comparison and contrast:
_____________________
MAKING MY MARK ON THE MAP
In November 1798 Matthew Flinders and George Bass sailed up what was to become the Tamar River where I now live. On January 3rd 1799 they arrived back at Port Jackson and Sydney Cove having sailed around Tasmania in the period October 7th to January 3rd. In July 1799 the islands in the Bass Strait were named and Bass was on his way back to England. Two hundred years later, in July 1999, I retired from full-time work and moved to the Tamar River, first to Launceston and then to George Town. I live in George Town to this day. By July 9th 1803 Flinders had circumnavigated Australia and literally put it on the map. It was not until July 18th 1814 before it was published on a map. On July 4th 2003 I began the 4th edition of my autobiography.

In these same years, two hundred years later, 1998 to 1803, I began my circumnavigation of the globe on the internet. Flinders and Bass were 24 to 28 when they circumnavigated Tasmania and then Australia from 1798 to 1803. I was 54 when I started out in 1998 to prepare for my exit from the job world and make my entrance onto the internet and 58 when I finally got my autobiography into shape. By the age of 58 I had truly made my initial navigations on the WWW and in my autobiography. I was not trying to put Australia on the map but, rather, to play my small part in the Bahá’í community and its map in/on the world.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, October 9th 2006.

I was an older man than you--
in the early evening of my life
when I put an end to travelling
and a start to staying in a place
and moving about in cyberspace
as I watched those Terraces with
their unfolding magnificence and
a resistless quickening by means
of a galvanic coherence of vision
and a chronology of expectations,
portentous happenings: always there
had been things portentous across
the divides in time right back to the
start of the Kingdom when I played
baseball, was enrolled in grade four
with Mrs. Jones at Lakeshore Primary
and imbibed a world and a culture as
unobtrusively as the light that would
be shed on centuries to come far beyond
this slough of despond and its forecasts
of doom which would pass swiftly as
the twinkle of a star—and, yes, I would
make my mark at this crucial point in time.1

1 Character and motivation are elusive, far from uniform, unable to explain an entire life and greatly changing. For the puzzled observer of character the ruling passion could be defined in terms of some irresistible simplification, some considered but necessary fiction; so often this puzzled observer selects his evidence and reason succumbs to need and its desire for single epithets to paint a man’s life. But, in the end, human character has its contradictions and inconsistencies, twistings and turnings, partly unnavigable, partly mysterious and quite beyond any simplifying theory.-W.B. Carnochan, Gibbon’s Solitude: the Inward World of the Historian, Stanford UP, 1987, pp. 91-105.

Ron Price
9 October 2006

Posted By Ron Price on Monday 9th October 2006 @ 20:40:00