Commonwealth of Australia

COMMONWEALTH OF AUSTRALIA Copyright Regulations 1969 Warning This material has been reproduced and communicated to you by or on behalf of The Charles Darwin University pursuant to Part VB of the Copyright Act 1968 (the Act). The material in this communication may be subject to copyright under the Act. Any further reproduction or communication of this material by you may be the subject of copyright protection under the Act. Do not remove this notice EXPLORATION European discovery of Australia ew things are as intriguing as a question mark on a map. For more than a thousand Fyears, mystery surrounded the possible existence of a great, unknown continent in the southern hemisphere. Greek and Roman philosophers argued for it and first century geographer Ptolemy sketched a huge landmass in the southern ocean. Ptolemy saw an unknown southern land-Terra Australis Incognita-as necessary to balance the lands of the northern hemisphere, and later cartographers agreed. It wasn't until the sixteenth century that European merchant adventurers reached the remote island continent. 1 The Renaissance was a time of discovery, of charting unknown lands in search of riches and, ultimately, empire. European ocean travel became possible through advances in shipbuilding and navigation.2 Superpowers Spain and Portugal struggled for global control and in the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas the Pope divided the non-Christian world between them. In the Pacific the line of demar cation followed line of longitude 129 degrees East of Greenwich, bisecting Australia and now forming the Western Australian border. Portugal thus 'acquired' what is now Western Australia, and Spain the rest of the continent. The Portuguese were the first Europeans to reach the Australian region and by 1516 had built a fortified trading post in Timor, only 460 km (285 miles) north of the Kimberley coast. 3 » Dutch encounters and the first kidnappings The first recorded encounters between outsiders and Australian Aborigines involved the Dutch, whose merchant fleet reached the East Indies, as the Malay Archipelago was called, in 1596. The Dutch East India Company (Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie or VOC) established its headquarters in Batavia (Jakarta) on java in 1619. Trade with the Spice Islands, where nutmeg and cloves were available, helped turn Holland into the wealthiest country of its time, and the Dutch replaced the Portuguese as masters of the eastern seas. Exploration of New Holland, as the Dutch named northern and western Australia, was motivated by the search for trade goods, especially gold, silver, sandalwood and above all nutmeg, a small sack of I 2 BATAVIA--- ' -. - ......... -- ... Ja·1a Jansz 1606 Torres 1606 Hartog 1616 Carstensz 1623 (}.QoO-()oOoO- Tasman 1642-44 Tasman 1644 De Vlamingh 1697 Dampier 1699 Cook 1768-71, 1776-80 D'Entrecasteaux 1792-93 \ • ·-· >-"" ·-' •PERTH ••• •") ':4. ' •• ••••• .............................. t , ............... ~ ................. ,.•"' i N VanDiemen'sland [fasmania) 0 200 400 600 Kilometres ••• --··)>' f-'--=--="1 :-sa .. -.) 0 200 400 600 Miles I )) European voyages of discovery. which had a 60 000 per cent mark-up in Europe and could set a merchant adventurer up for life. 4 Indigenous Australians gave their first Dutch visitors a hostile reception in 1606, when Willem Jansz sailed his ship Duyjken down the western edge of Cape York Peninsula, reaching a place he called Cape Keerweer ('Turn-Again'). His journal is lost, but fragmentary reports tell us his brief landfall (near modern Weipa) was marred by violence from naked 'savage, cruel, black barbarians'. Later that year, Spaniard Luis Vaes de Torres sailed through the narrow strait between New Guinea and Australia now called Torres Strait. He spent weeks negotiating innumerable reefs and islands, where he kidnapped 'twenty persons'. The 3 hostages reached the Philippines but nothing is known of what happened to them there. This kidnapping was the first of several aimed at training interpreters for use as intermediaries. The VOC's instructions to Jan Carstensz, the captain of the Pera, before his 1623 voyage were to kidnap 'some full-grown persons but especially young boys and girls, to the end that the latter may be brought up here [Batavia] and turned to useful purpose in ... their own country'.5 Carstensz and other voyagers were still searching for the fabled islands of gold, which, according to Marco Polo's fantasies, lay south of Java. They were doomed to disappointment. After sailing down Cape York, Carstensz reported: This is the most arid and barren region that could be found anywhere on the earth. The inhabitants, too, are the most wretched and poorest creanues that I have ever seen ... as there are no large trees anywhere on this coast, they have no boats or canoes ... These men are ... of tall stature and very lean to look at ... they are quite black and stark naked, some of them having their faces painted red and others white, with feathers stuck through the lower part of the nose ... with twisted nets round their heads. 6 Carstensz's first encounter with Aborigines, on 18 April1623 near the Edward River, began well when they were met by many inquisitive people, some armed and some unarmed, who 'showed no fear and were so bold as to touch the muskets of our men ... while they wanted to have whatever they could make use of'. Sadly, peace was shattered when the Dutch kidnapped a man, the sailors were attacked, and one Aborigine was shot. Two weeks later, a second man was seized and another was shot. Two hundred men brandishing spears opposed the next landing. When one was wounded, he was seized as a captive, but died soon afterwards. Until the English invention in the mid-eighteenth century of an accurate chronometer, mariners had no means of establishing their longitude. Errors in navigation, and the prevailing westerly winds, blew some Dutch ships onto the dangerous shoals of Western Australia. In 1629, a large Dutch ship, the Batavia, was shipwrecked in the Houtman Abrolhos islands off the western coast. Fellow Dutch men murdered 125 of the survivors. The Dutch rescue party from Java responded by executing eight of the perpetrators and exiling two of them on the adjacent coast. These two murderers were Europe's first living 'gift' to Australia. In 1642, Dutchman Abel Tasman headed further south in search of the elusive southern continent and became the first European to set foot on the island of Tasmania, which he named Van Diemen's Land. Dense clouds of smoke told him the island was inhabited. The men who went ashore found a tall tree with notches freshly cut up its trunk. 'They measured the shape of the steps and found each were 4 » Aboriginal men of the Kolaia tribe, Camhlidge Gulf; Western A1L1tralia, in the 1920s. They have cicatrices (scars) on their bodies and wear their hair bound around a pad of emu feathers, enabling small sacred o~jects to be carried hidden fi·om view. fully five feet [150 em] from one another so that they presumed here were very tall people or these people by some means must know how to climb up trees.' 7 In fact, the Tasmanians proved to be small people with good tree-climbing skills. »Dampier In January 1688, Englishman William Dampier, a literate buccaneer, spent two months in King Sound near Derby in the Kimberley (northwestern Australia) with his shipmates, repairing their beached trading ship, the Cygnet. Dampier, an acute observer, kept detailed notes preserved in waterproof bamboo cylinders sealed with wax. His vivid account was both successful and influential. In 1699, Dampier com manded an English naval expedition to explore the region further in the Roebuck. He voyaged along the western coast from Shark Bay to Roebuck Bay just south of Broome and produced another book. Dampier paints a grim picture of the arid northwest and its naked people: The inhabitants of this country are the miserablest people in the world. The Hodmadods 5 [Hottentots of AfricaJ ... for wealth are gentlemen to these. They have no houses, or skin garments, sheep, poultry, fruits of the earth ... They are tall, straight-bodied and thin, with small, long limbs. They have great heads, round foreheads and great brows. Their eyelids are always half closed, to keep the flies out of their eyes ... They have great bottle noses, pretty full lips and wide mouths. The two fore-teeth of their upper-jaw are wanting in all of them, men and women, old and young ... Nor have they any beards ... Their hair is black, short and curled like that of the Negroes, and not long and lank like the common Indians. The colour of their skins ... is coal-black like that of the Negroes of Guinea. They have no sort of clothes but a piece of the rind of a tree, tied like a girdle about their waists, and a handful of long grass, or three or four small green boughs full of leaves thrust under their girdle, to cover their nakedness ... They had such bad eyes, that they could not see us till we came close to them.H This is important evidence that pre-contact Australia was no paradise. Eye ailments were especially prevalent among desert Aborigines, and trachoma, a contagious inflammation of the eyelids, is still a chronic disease, often leading to blindness. Indeed, in the Western Desert language, the words for 'old' and 'blind' are interchangeable. This is also the first mention of Australian bush flies. Dampier complained that 'no fanning will keep them from coming to one's face; and without the assistance of both hands to keep them off, they will creep into one's nostrils and mouth too'. Lack of the two front teeth indicates tooth avulsion, a widespread initiation ritual in Australia. More puzzling is the mention of men's lack of beards, for in the Kimberley and elsewhere older men usually sported beards, although sometimes they shaved them with a sharp shell or stone 'knife'.

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