Muslim Discovery of Australia
Many people especially Europeans and others will credit Captain Cook to be the man who discovered the land of Australia in 1770. However they neglect the multitude of evidences of Muslims discovering Australia way before him.
Arabia
Islam came to the islands of Indonesia at an early time which is pretty close to Australia. Muslim traders and sailors established trade across India, Ceylon, Sri Lanka, Malay and Indonesia.
An Arab geographer named Abu Al-Fida wrote about an Arab expedition that circumnavigated the earth around the 1300s. Abu Al-Fida wrote that if two people were to set out from the same point and traveled around the earth in the exact opposite directions, they would come back to this same point but their calendar would differ by two days. Another Arab writer spoke of an animal with a pouch but confused it with a rhinoceros. It is possible that it was a hand account of a Wombat or Kangaroo.
The Arab writer by the name of Shamsuddin Muhammad was the Caliph of Damascus and wrote about an inhabited land beyond Madagascar, across the Indian ocean in place where Australia is situated. A 13th century account states that the sultan of Egypt called to his aid the Admiral of the Dry Tree, a mystical land of the eastern border of the Persia, in whose land the only currencies were millstones. The only region of which this is true is the Caroline Islands with their stone money. The Caroline Islands are a large archipelago of widely scattered islands in the western Pacific Ocean, northeast of New Guinea which is pretty close to Australia.
In 1332 a German Dominican named Brochard presented to the Pope and to Philip of France a memoir in which he told them of a voyage to the Indian Ocean in which he reached 24.S. but that other merchants and men of good faith (Arabs) had been down to 54.S.