By Bray Boland

The man credited with naming Australia, Matthew Flinders, is making one last journey to his final resting place in England as a coffin plate that identified his lost grave in London is sent down under for display. 

The remains of the leader of the first inshore circumnavigation of Australia more than 220 years ago have returned to his hometown of Donington in Lincolnshire to be reinterred in the church where he was baptised and married.

Flinders died in London in 1814 but his grave site was lost when his headstone was removed.

It was only rediscovered by chance in 2019 when a lead plate bearing his name was found on a coffin during the construction of a high-speed train line in London.

That plate is now being sent down under for display in South Australia.

A statue of Flinders and his seagoing cat Trim now stands outside Euston station near where his grave was found.

Descendants and devotees of the famed mariner are attending a ceremony in Lincolnshire on Saturday to mark the reinterment.

South Australian Governor Frances Adamson will be there along with a descendant of Bungaree, an Aboriginal man who joined Flinders in his circumnavigation.

The Royal Navy will fire a gun volley over Flinders’ new coffin and a guard of honour will be provided.

Governor Adamson will accept the coffin plate on behalf of the History Trust of South Australia and it is set to go on display first at the South Australian Maritime Museum, Port Adelaide.

The British admiralty set the navigator on his famous journeys circumnavigating and mapping Australia in the 1790s and early 1800s, to get a better idea of the new land and the surrounding seas.

He was arrested and detained by the French for six years on the island of Mauritius on the way back to England in 1803 to report and publish his findings.

Flinders was eventually released to return to England in 1810, only to die at the age of 40, just as his voyage summary and atlas were published.

While on Mauritius, Flinders laid out his preference for calling the new southern continent and Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania) Australia, instead of New Holland – a suggestion later taken up by Governor Macquarie in NSW.

When news broke in 2019 of the discovery of his lost grave, Flinders devotees in Australia called for his re-burial in the land he circled more than two centuries ago.

Organiser of the Donington reinterment Jane Pearson says although it was never going to happen, it was lovely to know people cared that much.

“We here at Donington, Matthew Flinders’ birthplace and the location of the burial of so many of his family, are delighted that he will finally be coming home to us,” she told AAP.

Ms Pearson is behind the Bring Him Home Facebook page that led the community push to have Flinders buried in his hometown.

About 70 Australians, including Dr Gillian Dooley of Flinders University, will attend the Donington event.

The author and contributor to books on Flinders has been invited as an expert on his life, relationships and personality.

“He was conscientious and dutiful, intellectual but romantic, loyal to his friends and family, stubborn and determined, both artistic and meticulous in his scientific work,” Dr Dooley says.

He was also reserved and proud, but could be playful and affectionate with his close friends, she says.

In Adelaide, Fiona Salmon, a descendant of Flinders’ sister and director of the art museum at Flinders University, has been collecting relics related to the seafarer coming down through her family as heirlooms.

They include personal items such as Flinders’ compass and uniform buttons restored at the university.

Although aware of her ancestry, it was during her time working at an art centre in central Arnhem Land that Ms Salmon realised the quality of Flinders’ work as a cartographer who made detailed maps of the Northern Territory coast.

“I suppose that was the first time it really dawned on me how rigorous he was as a scientist,” she says.

Maps by Flinders are also used by Waanyi artist Judy Watson, who Ms Salmon says tells an important story of the nation’s history with her work.

“It’s a beautiful way to engage students with this idea of layered histories and of the stories and the beliefs and the knowledge that existed at this place well before Flinders,” she says.