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I always thought that the British discovered Australia in the year 1770
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Our own version of an 18th century moon landing, with Captain Cook playing the part of Neil Armstrong
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But the weird thing is, Australia's got over 25,000 kilometres of coastline
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So how come no one had ever discovered it before? Or had they
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Less than 20 years after Cook's voyage of discovery, the First Fleet arrived off the shores of Australia
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This is what we learn at school, isn't it? In 1788, the first Europeans ever to settle in Australia
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arrived in Botany Bay. It was a hugely ambitious project, round about 1,500 people, men, women and children
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mostly convicts, transported to an unknown land 17,000 kilometres away. And that was the start of the biggest migration of humans
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by sea in history. It was a grim time in England. Petty crime was spiralling out of control
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The jails were so overcrowded that the hulks of old ships were being used to house prisoners
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England was running out of space, and the quick cure to her social ills was to send the problem offshore
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At the time of the First Fleet, 23 women were convicted in London of offences that carried the death penalty
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All were pardoned, provided they were prepared to go to New South Wales
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for the rest of their natural lives. Of the 23, only 16 agreed
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The other seven elected to die rather than come here to Australia
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This is the place that England criminals considered a fate worse than death For men at this time the death penalty meant being hanged But women who committed serious crimes could still be burned at the stake
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But they were prepared to risk that terrible fate shows the desperate fear they had of
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being exiled to the other side of the world. Today, most Australians treat a convict connection as a source of pride
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So having a first fleeter in the family is a bit like being minor royalty
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My great-great-great-great-grandmother was sentenced to hang for stealing at gunpoint coins from her employer
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My great, great, great, great, great grandfather was Edward Kimberley. He was arrested near Coventry for stealing several parcels of muslin
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Lydia was my great, great, great, great grandmother. She was sentenced to death in 1786 for stealing 10 yards of printed cotton
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He was transported to Australia for seven years on the first fleet. Fourteen years transportation
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Seven years transportation to Australia. Helen, Wayne and Cheryl belong to an elite club
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although identifying with rogues and scallywags is a national pastime in Australia, convict roots or otherwise
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Most Australians today also recognise that their convict relatives stepped ashore onto a land that was already occupied
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Watching their arrival were the original inhabitants of Australia, the Aborigines. If you want to talk about Australian ancestry
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Professor Eric Wilmot's family tree goes back not 200 years, but literally thousands
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If we'd been Aboriginal people looking out to sea on that day
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what would we have seen? You'd have seen a group of what appeared to be human beings land here
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They appeared human like the people watching them But once you get close to them they appear different For Aboriginal people it was a fascinating idea
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that they weren't as alone in this part of the world as they thought they were
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But I've heard that they thought what they were seeing was something like ghosts or cloud people
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Well, the cloud person thing came from their ships because the ships appeared on the horizon like clouds
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which slowly, if you watch them, they turned into ships. And these were the people from the cloud ships
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And the clothes had splashes of white over them. Now, white is a kind of an alarm colour
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If you look at an Aboriginal ceremony, main dancers come in. The ones that are supposed to carry a bit of shock
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Don't be painted white. These guys walk around and they've got brilliant white on their uniforms
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mixed with a bit of red and other colours. So they could have some potential for badness about them
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Oh, absolutely. They could have infected them with spirits of the long past or perhaps spirits that they didn't even know about
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Did they want to get rid of them? Not at first, but then they did, because the British had become both a threat and too much trouble
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And that was just their first impression. The arrival of the First Fleet marked the start of an English colony in Australia
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which only happened because of Cook's journey in the late 18th century
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But that's the British story. Many other nations were sailing the high seas in a race to find a great southern land
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And there's one first contact theory that blows all others out of the water
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I'm heading to a secret location not all that far from where Captain Cook first landed
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My guide is an environmentalist named Jake Kasser Who subscribes to a very radical take on history
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What's more, he's going to show me the evidence This is the last place you'd expect to see Egyptian hieroglyphs, isn't it
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There are so many There a load over here and up here as well Do we know what they say There a story I heard from an old lady when I was a young fellow growing up not far from here
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And this is just local folklore, Tony. Two Egyptian princes came out here, of course, all the way from Egypt and ended up shipwrecked
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And they've made their way up the hill where one of the brothers got bitten by a snake. And this may be a representation of the snake here with the horned viper and the two little birds may represent the Egyptian princes
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So one of the brothers was bitten by a snake and passed away, and the other Egyptian brother lived his life out here with a local tribe
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So this is independent Aboriginal folklore that tells the same story about Egyptians
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Yeah, well, there's a group out at Penrith, a tribe out in the Sydney area, that apparently use a lot of Egyptian words in their language
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Also in Western Australia, they say that they've got the same word for sun, ra
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There's a criticism, isn't there, that actually the Egyptians didn't have the technology
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to sail boats all this way 4,000 years ago? I've heard that, but if the Aboriginal people came over on canoes
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and the Maori went to the land of the long white cloud and canoes
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I can't see why the Egyptians couldn't do it. I mean, they had flushable toilets a couple of thousand years before Christ
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You're very robust about this, aren't you? You believe it? Well, if it is genuine
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then it could really change history the way we know it. Just a bit, mate
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I love Jake's passion, and I love the fact that he's determined to believe that it's all true
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But look at me, I'm just an old English sceptic. To me, the idea that an Egyptian civilisation discovered Australia 4,000 years ago is just very, very daft
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But maybe what all this does demonstrate is the fact that we all yearn to have something ancient and dramatic in our lives and in our landscape
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But the irony, as far as the Australians are concerned, is that they do
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Look at all these. These are the marks left by Aborigines over thousands of years
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That is the real, dramatic, ancient, magical story of Australia
