Bill Richardson - Published Works

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    Autobiographical note and selected bibliography
    ( 2013-06-28) Richardson, W A R
    William Arthur Ridley (Bill) Richardson, BA (Oxon), Dip.Ed. (Oxon), PhD (Flinders), was born in London 27 July 1924. After education at St John’s School, Leatherhead, Surrey (1937-42), he served in the British Army in the UK and SE Asia until 1947, and then studied at St John’s College, Oxford until 1952. He taught French and Spanish at Grammar Schools in Leytonstone, Winchester and Liverpool until 1965, when, together with his wife Helen and their two children he migrated to Australia to take up a lectureship at the University of Adelaide at Bedford Park, later Flinders University. There he taught Spanish, and Portuguese and Brazilian Studies, until retirement as an Associate Professor in 1987; since then he has been a Visiting Scholar there.
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    Northampton on the Welsh Coast? Some Fifteenth and Sixteenth-Century Sailing Directions
    (Cambrian Archaeological Association, 1995) Richardson, W A R
    Those fourteenth-, fifteenth- and sixteenth-century mariners who were literate almost certainly relied much more upon sailing directions than upon charts. A mere glance at some of the earliest surviving charts of areas other than the Mediterranean and the Black Sea will show why, for they amounted to little more than aides-memoires.
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    A Critique of Spanish and Portuguese Claims to Have Discovered Australia
    (Investigator. Geelong Historical Society, 1995) Richardson, W A R
    Claims that the Spanish and especially the Portuguese discovered Australia before the Dutch and English have gained a good deal of credence since they were first advanced. The matter is of some interest to the Geelong area particularly as Bonito's treasure at Queenscliff, the Geelong Keys and the Mahogany Ship near Warrnambool are often cited as "evidence". In this article Bill Richardson makes a detailed examination of these claims.
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    Response to Roy Schreiber's review of "Was Australia charted before 1606?"
    (American Historical Review, 2008) Richardson, W A R
    The author responds to a review of his book, 'Was Australia Charted before 1606?', justifying his reasoning in point form.
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    Toponymy and the History of Cartography
    (Royal Australian Historical Society, 1992) Richardson, W A R
    Within the last few years historians of cartography have become increasingly aware of the potential value of toponymy for the elucidation of early cartographical enigmas. One of the most notorious of these is the real identity of the apparent continent of Jave-la-Grande which figures exclusively on a number of French manuscript maps made in Dieppe in the mid-sixteenth century. Its position south of Java gave rise to the understandable supposition that it was an inaccurate, primitive map of Australia, since Australia is the only landmass that really does exist very approximately in that position. The east coast of Jave-la-Grande, though vaguely similar to Australia's east coast, has one feature which conspicuously fails to correspond to any on Australia's east coast, namely the huge triangular projection of cap de fremose. Only the most vivid imagination can find any resemblance whatsoever between the two west coasts.
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    Yet Another Version of the Portuguese 'Discovery' of Australia
    (The Globe. The Australian Map Circle, 2007) Richardson, W A R
    In this article, written in response to the recent publication of a book by Peter Trickett, 'Beyond Capricorn: How Portuguese adventurers secretly discovered and charted Australia and New Zealand 150 years before Captain Cook', the author dismisses the latest claims that the Portuguese discovered Australia.