10 Facts About James Matra

James Mario Matra, sailor and diplomat, was an American-born midshipman on the voyage by James Cook to Botany Bay in 1770.

James Matra was the first person of Corsican heritage to visit the future nation of Australia.

James Matra's father James was a member of a prominent Corsican family who had migrated to Dublin, Ireland in the early 1730s, where he studied medicine and changed his surname from Matra to Magra.

James Matra moved to New York City, where his son James Mario Magra was born in 1746.

James Matra was the author of the "Proposal for Establishing a Settlement in New South Wales" put forward in 1783, which the immediate forerunner of the official and semi-official "plans" was resulting in the foundation of the first Australian colony.

James Matra looked forward to Australia as an asylum for "those unfortunate loyalists to whom Great Britain was bound by every tie of honour and gratitude and with visions, perhaps, of a reproduction of the life of the planters of Virginia and Carolina".

James Matra pushed the latter plan partly because he had aspirations to become the first Governor of the new penal colony.

In 1786 James Matra accepted the appointment of consul at Tangier, Morocco.

James Matra remained in Tangier until his death there on 29 March 1806.

James Matra is remembered in the Sydney suburb of Matraville, and in the islet of Magra on the Great Barrier Reef.