eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781760871420 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Allen & Unwin Pty., Limited |
| Publication date: | 06/17/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 432 |
| File size: | 10 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
EXPLORATION
European discovery of Australia
Few things are as intriguing as a question mark on a map. For more than a thousand years, 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. 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. 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 demarcation followed the 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.
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 which had a 60,000 per cent mark-up in Europe and could set a merchant adventurer up for life.
Indigenous Australians gave their first Dutch visitors a hostile reception in 1606, when Willem Jansz sailed his ship Duyfken 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 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 fullgrown 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'.
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 creatures 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.
Carstensz's first encounter with Aborigines, on 18 April 1623 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 survivors murdered 125 of the shipwrecked passengers. 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 fully five feet [150 cm] 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.' 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 commanded a British 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 [Hottentots of Africa] ... 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.
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'. (This is clear evidence that flies have always existed in Australia, long before the arrival of cows, sheep and pigs with the early white settlers, who have sometimes been blamed for their introduction.)
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'. The people's main food was fish, caught in stone fish traps. Similar traps are still used by Bardi people as the most efficient way of harvesting fish. Dampier also remarked on other key aspects of Aboriginal life — small-scale societies, close communal living and the habit of sharing all procured food:
They have no houses but lie in the open air without any covering ... they live in companies of twenty or thirty men, women and children together. Their only food is a small sort of fish, which they get by making wares [weirs or traps] of stone across little coves ... Every tide brings in the small fish ... at low-water they seek cockles, mussels and periwinkles. There are very few of these shellfish ... At their places of abode ... the old people ... and tender infants await their return; and what providence has bestowed on them they presently broil on the coals and eat it in common ... Whether they get little or much, every one has his part ... When they have eaten, they lie down till the next low-water, and then all who are able march out, be it night or day, rain or shine ... They must attend the wares or else they must fast.
When Dampier first anchored, 'seeing men walking on the shore, we presently sent a canoe to get some acquaintance with them, for we were in hopes to get some provision among them. But the inhabitants, seeing our boat coming, ran away and hid themselves. We searched three days in hopes to find their houses, but found none. Yet we saw many places where they had made fires.' Later they went over to an island, where they found 40 men, women and children. At first, they were threatened with spears, but no violence ensued. Surprisingly, on this coast Aborigines had no visible watercraft. Dampier's crew saw 'a drove of these men swimming from one island to another'. They picked up four and gave them boiled rice, turtle and fish. 'They greedily devoured what we gave them, but took no notice of the ship or anything in it, and when they were set on land again, they ran away as fast as they could ... Nor did they seem to admire anything we had.' Fear, shyness, lack of curiosity and indifference to foreign goods — except food and weapons — characterised most first encounters between Aborigines and outsiders.
Another incident involved the first European attempt to persuade Aborigines to work for them. The task was to carry small barrels of freshwater from earthern wells down to the boats. Dampier gave the men some old clothes, filled the casks and put a barrel on each man's shoulders, but nothing happened: 'all the signs we could make were to no purpose, for they stood like statues without motion, and grinned like so many monkeys, staring one upon another. For these poor creatures do not seem accustomed to carrying burdens ... So we were forced to carry our water ourselves. They very fairly put the clothes off again, and laid them down as if clothes were only for working in.'
A chasm of misunderstandings yawns here. Aborigines saw trade as exchange of artefacts not of labour — they laid down the clothes because they did not want them, and they had no concept or words for 'work'. Aboriginal men did not carry burdens, except their weapons, so that their hands were free for hunting — the women carried household items and small children when moving camp.
Dampier's account is especially valuable in showing us the rigours of traditional life in a harsh, arid environment. Although he could not understand their language, the scarcity of food and lack of watercraft was clear enough. By the time of colonisation, however, the Bardi were using mangrove rafts to hunt turtle and dugong with long fishing spears.
Further Dutch voyages
Dampier's books rekindled Dutch suspicions of British intentions in New Holland, so in 1705 three ships commanded by Maarten van Delft set out for northern Australia. They visited Arnhem Land and Bathurst and Melville Islands, home of the Tiwi people. There was prolonged contact with Aborigines and they reported that the people:
possess nothing which is of value ... and have ... only a stone which is ground and made to serve as a hatchet. They have no habitations, either houses or huts; and feed on fish which they catch with harpoons of wood, and also by means of nets, putting out to sea in small canoes, made of the bark of trees ... Some of them had marks on their body, apparently cut or carved ... Their diet seems to consist of fish, and a few roots and vegetables ... No one was able to understand their language.
The crew of Jean Etienne Gonzal's ship Rijder in 1756 have the dubious distinction of being the first Europeans to introduce alcohol into Australia. The liquor was arrack, a strong spirit made from fermented palm juices, which Cape York Aborigines reportedly enjoyed and made 'merry and even struck up a kind of a chant'. Despite their genuine interest in the region, the Dutch neither claimed nor settled it.
The Macassans
Dugout sailing canoes were first introduced to tropical Australia by Macassans — Indonesian fishermen, who made lengthy annual visits but never settled on Australian soil. From around 1720, trade through the Dutch port of Makassar in Sulawesi included increasing quantities of trepang (bêchedemer or sea cucumber), which was sold to China. In Australia's shallow tropical waters these worm-like, cucumber-sized animals were abundant, a food that neither Europeans nor Aborigines ate but one which was prized by the Chinese as a delicacy and aphrodisiac. Indonesian beds had been exhausted by 1720, and so the exploitation of Australian trepang began. The trepang were caught by Macassan fishermen along 1100 km (700 miles) of Australian coast from the Kimberley to the eastern Gulf of Carpentaria. The trepang-bearing western coast they called Kayu Jawa and that to the east Marege (pronounced Ma-rey-geh). The Macassans called themselves, and were known to Aborigines as, Mangkasara — Makasar people from the southwest corner of Sulawesi. They had a long and proud history and had been officially Muslim since the early seventeenth century. Their voyages to Australia were carefully regulated with formal contracts and sailing passes. The Macassans used praus — wooden sailing ships that had rectangular sails raised on a demountable tripod-mast and were guided with two rudders hanging from a beam across the stern. Similar praus carried goods and people throughout the Malay Archipelago.
Tropical Australia's climate is monsoonal, with a wet season from December to February and a dry season from June to September. When the monsoon winds began to blow from the northwest in November or December, praus sailed the 2000 km (1250 miles) from Makassar to Australia. The ships left carrying weapons but no cargoes and, after five months of fishing, headed north again, laden with dried trepang, beeswax and tortoiseshell, when the winds blew from the southeast in late April to May.
Macassan camps are identifiable from shards of red pottery, green glass from square-necked gin bottles, bronze coins and tall, feathery, imported tamarind trees. Camps were located on easily defended islands or promontories and were furnished with stone fireplaces, huge metal boiling-down cauldrons, smoke-houses and wells for drinking-water. Some of these items appear in Aboriginal rock paintings.
In February 1803, while circumnavigating Australia, Matthew Flinders came across eleven Macassan praus off Arnhem Land. With his Malay cook translating, Flinders talked with Pobasso, the commander, who told him there were 60 praus in their fleet, crewed by over a thousand men. He described how 'they get the trepang in from 3 to 8 fathoms water [5–14 m, 18–48 ft]; and where it is abundant, a man will bring up eight or ten at a time.' They were also caught by net or spear. Trepang were first cured by boiling. They were then gutted, cooked again (with mangrove-bark to give flavour and colour), dried in the sun, and smoked. After this, they would keep almost indefinitely. The end-product, according to naturalist Alfred Wallace, resembled 'sausages which have been rolled in mud and then thrown up the chimney'.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Original Australians"
by .
Copyright © 2006 Josephine Flood.
Excerpted by permission of Allen & Unwin.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Preface xi
Notes on terminology xix
1 Exploration 1
European discovery of Australia
2 Colonisation 37
Early Sydney
3 Confrontation 73
Early Tasmania and Victoria
4 Depopulation 117
A century of struggle (1820s-1920s)
5 Tradition 161
Indigenous life at first contact
6 Origins 203
The last 65,000 years
7 Assimilation 243
A time of trouble (1930s-1970s)
8 Resurgence 287
The story continues
Appendix: Places to visit, festivals and tours to experience Australian Indigenous culture 337
Abbreviations to the notes 341
Notes 343
Further reading 393
Index 397