Researching Warrnambool's lost link with Portuguese navigators 500 years ago

Festival organiser and honorary consul of Portugal Carlos Pereira de Lemos says his research into the maps from the 16^th century provided the evidence of the discovery.

The legend of the illusive Mahogany Ship - said to be have wrecked between Warrnambool and Port Fairy - has always provided the link to Warrnambool and first sparked Mr de Lemos' interest in Portugal's historic connection to Australia.

But it is the mapping, he says, that provides the evidence of the "secret" trips to Australia by the Portuguese in the 1500s.

The connection is so significant, Dr Lemos said, that he had asked the mayor of Portugal's capital Lisbon to erect a monument near the famous Torre de Belem or Monument to the Discoveries to honour the link to Australia.

He made the request about three weeks ago and his idea would honour navigator Cristovao de Mendonca, who played a part in the mapping of Australia before the Dutch or English.

"I know the mayor of Lisbon and I suggested to him that there should be some recognition of the fact that the Portuguese were the first to map Australia," Dr de Lemos said.

Other MPs had shown interest in the idea, he said.

"Nothing has been decided yet. Those things take time," he said.

"I hope that something happens."

Dr de Lemos said there was also quite a bit of media interest in Portugal on the issue and a paper he recently wrote about the history of the Portuguese navigators mapping Australia.

He said it had already been published in two newspapers and a magazine in Portugal, and he had been interviewed on Portuguese TV.

Dr de Lemos said in his paper that celebrating the date was controversial because there were still official institutions and historians who continued to deny the Portuguese were the first westerners to reach this continent and the first to map the Australian coastline.

Dr de Lemos was working as a chief surveyor when he came to Australia in 1963 after his wife was given a scholarship to do a Phd, and they ended up staying.

It was a book written by Kenneth McIntyre in 1977 called The Secret Discovery of Australia that sparked his interest in Warrnambool and Australia's connection to his home country.

Dr de Lemos said McIntyre's book claimed the wreck of the Mahogany Ship was a Portuguese navigator that came to grief along the south-west coast.

"Of course we haven't found it, but McIntyre's book is a very important history of the whole thing," he said.

He said while there had been a lot attempts to find the elusive ship over the years - including a $250,000 reward from the Victorian Government in 1992 - no one had had any luck so far.

"It's hard to know what happened to the wreck. Is it still under the sand or was it re-claimed again by the sea or was it used to make firewood?" he said.

But he said, it was not the Mahogany Ship but the maps that was the evidence the Portuguese were here 500 years ago.

McIntyre's work demonstrated the Dauphin map - published in 1536 - was of Australia's east coast up to the current location of Warrnambool, Dr de Lemos said.

His research of archives in Lisbon confirmed, he said, that Cristovao de Mendonca was given secret instructions to discover what they referred to as the "Island of gold" - Australia.

Failure to carry out the mission, he said, would have be a death sentence and that never happened.

Five iron keys were also found on the edge of Corio Bay in Geelong in 1847 which indicated the presence of Europeans before the time of Captain Cook, Dr de Lemos said.

The keys likely fell into the bay in roughly 1522 when Cristovao de Mendonca was known to be sailing in the area, he said.

The lack of historical documents to prove the expeditions to Australia, he said, could be explained by the secret nature of the mission especially because it would be operating in territory that belonged to Spain and being there would have violated a treaty of 1494.

He said other documents at the House of India about Portuguese presence in the Orient would have been destroyed in Lisbon's 1755 earthquake, and floods and fires that followed.

"Evidence was found in maps produced in France and Holland which had been drawn based on Portuguese maps," Dr de Lemos wrote in his paper.

Portugal was at the forefront of cartography and students from other countries went there to learn, he wrote, and the French had also seized some Portuguese ships and took possession of the maps they found onboard.

Dr de Lemos' interest in the Portuguese link to Warrnambool led him to create a monument at Cannon Hill and start a festival in 1991. There is even a street here named after him.

He helped get the Padrao and busts of Vasco da Gama and Prince Henry the Navigator erected overlooking Lady Bay with the help of the governor of Macau.

"While it could not be said that these symbols celebrate the discovery of Australia by the Portuguese, they do celebrate the early Portuguese navigators who ventured in the southern seas," he wrote.

Dr de Lemos will give a talk at Flagstaff Hill Maritime Museum on Saturday, February 26, about his research.

The festival - which runs over two days will include a dinner on the Saturday night and a luncheon at Lake Pertobe with Portuguese dancing.

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