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Island Nation
A History of Australians and the Sea
By Frank Broeze Allen & Unwin
Copyright © 1998 Frank Broeze
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-74269-668-3
CHAPTER 1
Aboriginal Settlement and European Expansionism
British Australia in the Asia-Pacific Region
Australia is one of the largest islands of the world. It is set apart by huge oceanic spaces from Africa and South Asia in the west, South America in the east, and the second island-continent Antarctica in the south. For millions of years it formed part of the larger area of Sahul which also covered Papua New Guinea, West Irian and a host of smaller islands to the west and northeast. The fifth continent was created in its present-day form only about 10 000 years ago as a result of the submergence of Torres Strait. Sahul had been separated by the island region of Wallacea from the nearest landmass, that of Sunda, which in more recent times changed in appearance through the rising of the sea level. It formed, with its myriads of smaller islands, the Malay Peninsula and the Greater Sunda islands, which with the Wallacean archipelagoes of the Philippines and eastern Indonesia now form the geographical bridge between Australia and the southeastern corner of Asia. The only other land close to Australia is New Zealand, some 2500 kilometres across the Tasman Sea.
Sahul must have been populated from Sunda, probably not much later than intermediary islands such as Timor and Luzon. Despite recent finds of intriguing cave paintings which may suggest a much earlier date, the first Australians probably arrived by foot 60 000 years ago, about the time the first Americans crossed Bering Strait from Siberia into Alaska. Subsequent waves of Aborigines may have had to cross some water in a shallow land-bridge that formed the beginnings of Torres Strait. Aboriginal population expanded along the full length of the continent's coastline and into the heart of its arid interior, establishing a remarkable ecological diversity of lifestyles. At many suitable locations around the continent's littoral, on Tasmania, which was reached across a shallow Bass Strait, and on many islands in Torres Strait, tribal groups depended on their ability to identify and exploit the maritime resources of their amphibious environment. The Tiwis of Bathurst Island and the Bardis of the Kimberley were among the most accomplished of these peoples and maintained their lifestyles until the present time. The people of Croker Island in 1997 were the first to enter a claim for sea rights, based on their centuries-old fishing traditions. Many Aborigines used rafts or small boats for fishing and transport, but none of these craft were strong enough to let them venture outside their immediate habitat.
Indigenous Australians thus remained isolated from the other lands in their region. They did not return to New Guinea, nor did they have any impact on the process of peopling the islands and archipelagoes of the western and central Pacific Ocean. This remarkable feat of maritime venturing was completed when, some time between 800 and 1000 AD, New Zealand was settled from eastward by the Maoris, a people of Polynesian lineage. It is inviting to speculate whether Maoris would ultimately have crossed the Tasman Sea and 'discovered' the land which the Swedish cartographer Djurberg in the 1780s, in their language, proposed to call Ulimaroa. But the first travellers from their own region that Australians saw were seamen from Macassar (nowadays Ujungpandang, on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi) who from the last quarter of the seventeenth century set sail to the land they called Marege' — the coast of northern Australia from the Kimberleys to the Gulf of Carpentaria. In annual voyages not dissimilar to those of present-day fishermen from the eastern islands of Indonesia, the Macassans came principally to harvest trepang and other marine animals for sale in their home port for re-export to China. Australia's first foreign trade had been created, but for several Aboriginal groups more important was their social interaction with the Macassans in their seasonal beach camps. Relations between the groups varied from cordial to hostile, but there is ample evidence that individual Aborigines worked on Macassan boats and travelled to Ujungpandang. For them the sea was no longer a barrier but a place of work and the maritime road to Macassan society — the first steps in modern times to connect Australians with the peoples and markets of Asia.
Enter the Dutch
Ironically, these first contacts between Australians and Asians were the direct result of European penetration into Asia — an epochal stage in world history seventy years or so before the Macassans brought the first European visitors to Australia's shores. In 1661 the Dutch United East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, or VOC) conquered Macassar and included this important regional emporium in their trading and shipping network. An important part of their economic policy was the elimination of local merchants and seafarers from the most important regional trade routes. Desirous of finding new employment for their maritime skills and of maintaining their seaborne way of life, many Macassans now turned to trepanging, which soon was to carry them to Marege'.
By this time, however, many Aboriginal groups on the continent's littoral had discovered the Dutch themselves. Ultimately, James Cook's voyage in 1770 along the east coast would have the most profound consequences for indigenous Australians, but the first Europeans to be sighted by Aborigines had already touched Australian shores more than 150 years before Cook touched the east coast. For centuries many European geographers had believed there was a great continent in the southern hemisphere to offset the large landmass of Europe and Asia, a belief which was reinforced by the fabulous tales with which Marco Polo had returned from China. But the Southland remained unknown for many years after the Portuguese, starting with Vasco da Gama's arrival in India in 1498, established their geographically far-reaching but thinly stretched Estado do India. Largely grafting themselves onto existing networks of Asian maritime trade, they simply did not have the resources to press exploration into unknown waters. Their empire ran out of steam at Dili, on East Timor, separated by the Timor and Arafura Seas from Australia. It was left to the Dutch, who in the 1590s entered the 'Asian business' by sailing directly to the East Indies, to use the Moluccas as the base from which to push the frontiers of the world they knew further east and south.
Many Australians and others like to believe that other Europeans actually preceded the Dutch, with most support being given to the theory of a Portuguese discovery. Although the various enthusiasts display remarkable ingenuity and credulity in their scenarios — which are mainly founded on a series of French charts dating from the mid-sixteenth century and known as the 'Dieppe maps', and the alleged presence of the remains of the 'Mahogany Ship', a Portuguese caravel said to have been wrecked in 1521 somewhere in the dunes near Warrnambool — there is as yet no hard evidence that the Portuguese actually bridged the gap to Australia. The Dutch were the first Europeans to sight and explore Australia, and, conversely, to be experienced by the indigenous people. The VOC had been formed in 1601 to unite all existing and projected syndicates participating in the newly opened trade with the East Indies and the Moluccas. In late 1605 the VOC leadership in the Indies sent Captain Willem Jansz with the little vessel Duyfken ('little dove') from Banda to explore the great island of New Guinea and the lands beyond, which they hoped would include the unknown Southland. New Guinea was so named because it was reputed to be rich in gold, a belief confirmed in the 1980s by Australian companies such as BHP.
But Jansz found no trace of gold or people interested in trade. Typically, his instructions included the capture of indigenous people in order to gather information. One attempt to lure a group of Papuans aboard resulted in serious loss of life among his crew and was the precursor for the first killings of Aborigines by Europeans. Misled by the large number of small islands and shallows of Torres Strait into assuming that New Guinea stretched southwards, Jansz turned south. He saw land first on the eastern shore of the Gulf of Carpentaria and soon made contact with Aborigines. The encounter between Aborigines and Europeans very quickly turned violent as several clashes occurred and a number of Aborigines were killed. The Dutch, exhausted and disappointed in their hopes of finding gold and opportunities for trade, turned north at Cape Keerweer ('Turnround').
Four further exploratory voyages in the region (1623, 1636, 1644, 1705) were equally disappointing from a commercial viewpoint and made the Dutch abandon all interest in New Guinea. From the Australian perspective, the chief historical significance of these voyages is that they showed that already the process of exploration resulted in warfare since European seafarers did not hesitate to resort to violence and to kidnap indigenous people. But while Papuans and Aborigines were both determined and able to resist, many of the main features of their lands received Dutch names, and features of PNG and Australia appeared on Western maps as Carstensz Peaks, Gulf of Carpentaria, Groote Eylandt, Arnhem Land and Staaten River.
Contrary to common assumptions about Dutch efficiency, the failure of their exploration effort in the north was to a great extent due to the shortcomings of Abel Tasman, the commander of the 1644 voyage, in executing instructions. He had specifically been ordered to explore the opening between New Guinea and Australia which Governor-General Anthony van Diemen was convinced existed. But Tasman failed to probe the issue and instead sailed straight for the eastern side of the Gulf of Carpentaria. As an explorer he stands in sharp contrast to James Cook, who vowed to go not just further than anyone had ventured before but as far as was humanly possible. And Tasman did not have Bougainville's excuse, when the latter in 1767 approached the Great Barrier Reef and, fearing that he was on a lee shore, decided it was too dangerous to try and break through it. With the easterly currents and the right monsoon Tasman would have had no difficulty disengaging himself and returning to Java. The first passage through the waters between Australia and PNG had actually occurred a few months before Jansz in 1606 had failed to reveal its existence, when the Spanish explorer Luis Torres traversed the strait which was later to bear his name. Significantly, he had come from the east. Until the time of steam navigation this was to remain the only direction in which the slow-moving and cumbersome European sailing-ship could practically make the passage; even then it always remained a perilous passage, as the 1791 wrecking of HMS Pandora, with the captive Bounty mutineers aboard, showed. Although Torres saw many islands and perhaps even the tip of Cape York, his voyage had for almost two centuries no relevance at all for Australia. Conversely, he probably was not seen by any indigenous Australians as there were no traditions among Torres Strait Islanders of any sightings of the Spanish expedition. Then in 1788, having become known to the British through the capture of documents during the conquest of Manila in 1762, Torres Strait enabled the new British settlement at Sydney to be linked through the Arafura Sea to the Dutch East Indies and the waters and ports beyond. Thus, as we shall see later, it became the saviour of the young white colony.
Much more familiar to the Dutch than the elusive Torres Strait became the long western coast of Australia. In 1616 Captain Dirk Hartog, of the ship Eendracht, accidentally sighted the west coast and during the next few decades Dutch seafarers saw and charted large parts of the continent's western and southern coasts. This development was due to the adoption by the VOC in 1614 of a new route from the southern Atlantic Ocean to the Strait Sunda. This route, making use of the prevailing westerly winds, ran straight east at approximately 40° latitude South and curved north towards Java only a few hundred kilometres west of the Australian coast. As it remained for a long time extremely difficult to establish the correct longitudinal position of a ship, many captains sailed too far east — some with disastrous results as they piled up their ships on reefs off the coast. This landfall was an outcome of the routine navigation of the VOC rather than of a determined policy of reconnaissance. And in the few cases that ships were sent out to explore, their objective was mainly to discover the fate of ships that had failed to arrive at the VOC's headquarters on Java, Batavia (Jakarta).
During the years following Dirk Hartog's discovery, several more ships of the VOC came in sight of Australia. The shipwreck and subsequent mutiny of the Batavia (1629) was a tragic highlight in this process of maritime-terrestrial contact which continued well into the eighteenth century. It also included two expeditions specifically sent out to investigate the Australian coast, those of Abel Tasman (1642-43) and Willem de Vlamingh (1696-97). The former was sent out by Governor- General Van Diemen, who seems to have been the first to use the name New Holland ('Nieuw Holland', after the most powerful province of the Netherlands) for the Southland. It was on his second expedition that Tasman reached New Zealand ('Nieuw Zeeland', named after the Dutch Republic's second-most important maritime province). In view of Tasman's failure to land on any of the coasts he was sent to explore, it is an irony that his name is still perpetuated in Tasmania, even more ironic that that island's name was in the 1840s changed to Tasmania from the original Van Diemen's Land. The names of Tasman's ships are also still there, in Mount Zeehan and Mount Heemskerk, and the mining town Zeehan.
By the early eighteenth century large parts of the Australian coastline had been mapped and labelled with Dutch names. As very little of that mapping was done with adequate precision, later British and French hydrographers had to do the job all over again, and in that process many Dutch names were struck out; only the most eminent landmarks, such as Cape Leeuwin, Rottnest Island and Swan River (the English translation of 'Zwanerivier') remained.
Although European knowledge of the coasts of Australia changed significantly through the voyages of the VOC, they made no impact on the indigenous societies of these lands. The two mutineers of the Batavia who were put ashore vanished without trace, and theories about contacts between Aborigines and the shipwrecked crew and passengers of the Zuytdorp (1702) are no more than speculation. The most detailed descriptions of Aboriginal life were not made by the indifferent Dutch but by the English buccaneer William Dampier, who landed in Roebuck Bay. Often regarded as one of the harshest critics of the Aborigines, recent research has shown that his journal was more understanding than the account that appeared in print. Nevertheless, neither the Australians he observed nor the Maoris who attacked Tasman in 'Murderers Bay' were influenced by these contacts. Conversely, the Dutch and British were clearly impressed by Tasman's testimony (later confirmed by Cook) to the efficacy of Maori resistance: the Dutch never returned to New Zealand and the British in 1786 did not even consider it an option for their convict schemes.
The Europeans return to the Pacific
Lack of interest in the Pacific ended dramatically as a result of the eighteenth-century global superpower conflict between Britain and France, in which to a lesser extent the Netherlands and Spain were also involved, the latter above all to maintain its empty claims to exclusive possession of the 'Spanish Lake' and the Southland of which it had in 1606 taken possession under the name 'Australia del Espiritu Santo'. The Spanish position was based on their control over the entire west coast of Latin America from Cape Horn to California and the conquest of the Philippines in the 1540s.
During the last quarter of the seventeenth century England had taken over the mantle of maritime leadership in northern Europe. The Union with Scotland in 1707 reinforced Britain's economic and financial basis, strengthened its maritime worldview, and hardened the anti-French policies of its government. Bourbon France, by contrast to Britain both a continental and a maritime power, found first the Dutch Republic and then Britain blocking its path to domination of the European continent and the creation of an overseas empire to rival that of Britain. While France's alliance with Spain brought that country both advantages and disadvantages, Britain single-mindedly pursued its national self-interest.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Island Nation by Frank Broeze. Copyright © 1998 Frank Broeze. Excerpted by permission of Allen & Unwin.
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