Matthew Flinders (1774-1814) was a British navigator who is famed for leading the first expedition to circumnavigate the coast of Australia. He is also known for being one of the first people to refer to the landmass as 'Australia', rather than 'New Holland' or the unwieldy 'Terra Australis' that were in common usage in maps until the early nineteenth century. This is his published account of that voyage, first printed in 1814 in two volumes with a supplementary atlas.

In his early career, Flinders had served with William Bligh (1754-1817) on his second voyage to collect breadfruit from Tahiti, the first having been the infamous Bounty expedition (RCIN 1142197). In 1795, he served as midshipman aboard HMS Resilience, which travelled to New South Wales with the colony's new governor, John Hunter. During this voyage, Flinders became friends with the ship's surgeon, the botanist George Bass, and in 1801 the two men petitioned the Admiralty through the influence of Sir Joseph Banks to outfit an expedition to survey the coast of the Australian landmass. Banks was the scientist who had accompanied James Cook on the Endeavour voyage of 1768-71, and he had a profound reputation in London. His support ensured that the voyage would go ahead as a scientific expedition, rather than a naval or commercial venture.

Aboard the ship HMS Investigator, a former collier bought by the Admiralty in 1798 and outfitted as a survey vessel, Flinders and Bass, accompanied by several other scientists, botanists, cartographers, artists and an astronomer, sailed for New South Wales in the summer of 1801. They arrived at the south-western coast of Australia in December that year and anchored at King George Sound (now Albany, Western Australia) where they had an amicable encounter with the indigenous Noongar people before sailing east towards the colony at Port Jackson (Sydney).

In May 1802, Investigator entered Bass Strait, a body of water which separated Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania) from the mainland. The island had been thought to be a peninsula, and the discovery of a strait meant that ships could reach New South Wales much sooner than previously believed. After spending some time in Port Jackson, Flinders then began to survey the eastern coast of Australia around the Great Barrier Reef and Torres Strait accompanied by the brig Lady Nelson.

Lady Nelson often ran aground and was easily damaged so Flinders sent it back to Port Jackson before passing beyond the Torres Strait in order to chart the Gulf of Carpentaria. While in the gulf, surveys of the ship's timbers revealed Investigator to be suffering from terrible damage so Flinders sailed to a Dutch outpost on the island of Timor to try to acquire a replacement. None could be found, and with many of the crew suffering from dysentery and scurvy, it was decided to return to Port Jackson. Due to the damage of the ship, passage eastwards back through the strong currents of the Torres Strait was impossible, so Flinders sailed westwards, skirting the coast of Australia and arriving at Port Jackson in June 1803. In doing this, the Investigator became the first ship to circumnavigate the Australian continent.