This poem by Elizabeth Adams is reproduced with permission from the October 2023 issue of Cook’s Log, the journal of the Captain Cook Society (www.captaincooksociety.com)
Captain Flinders Goes Home
If Dampier had lived in time to meet Cook,[1]
Would they have realised they both had stood
At opposite ends of the same landmass?
I like to think so, but doubt that they would.
For it wasn't until twenty years after Cook
That Captain Flinders sailed all the way
Round the vast, seemingly endless coast
And gave it the name we use to this day.
Most 'Brits' never took much notice of Flinders
Until, when digging for the country's new train,
His coffin was found in old burial ground
Where for two hundred years he had quietly lain.
He refused to live a life mediocre,
And now that for his body we no longer search,
He need fear no more to "rest .... unnoticed",
For he'll be taken back to his Lincolnshire church.
Reference [1] William Dampier was the first recorded Englishman to set foot on Australia, some 80 years before Cook.