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because of the copious survival knowledge acquired with the years. A culture with no written records had to preserve and pass on all ideas, arguments, technology and traditions from one generation to the next through the spoken word. It’s therefore no surprise that Aboriginal society was heavy on song, gesture, story and elaborate ceremony. Learning responsibility and the rules that govern stable society went hand in hand with acquiring the skills of food gathering and resource management.

      Trading with the neighbours

      Pre-European Australia was a very social place — it took teamwork to survive in such a challenging land! Tribes had complex kinship and trading connections over vast distances, and even overseas. (Many are surprised to learn that the Aboriginals were not ‘pre-contact’ at all when the First Fleet arrived — they’d been trading, intermarrying and presumably speaking with the Macassans of Indonesia for decades, and quite possibly centuries). As in much of the world at the time, the barter economy was a part of life.

      Key items for trading included:

       Pituri, a mildly narcotic plant, which the Aboriginals exchanged for Indonesian tobacco

       Pearls and pearl shells, farmed by northern tribes and useful as ornamentation and for magic rituals

       Stone suitable for tools

       Ochre, used heavily in ritual and ceremony

      

No books, maps or made roads existed in Aboriginal Australia, and so these overland trading routes — sometimes hundreds of kilometres long — had to be memorised. Being able to navigate your way across a desert continent without cars, trains or even pack animals is no mean feat.

      For more on Aboriginal people pre–European settlement, see Indigenous Australia For Dummies, 2e, by Larissa Behrendt, Wiley Australia Publishing.

Visitors from Overseas

      Although the British explorers such as Cook and Flinders often get the credit for ‘discovering’ Aboriginal Australia, they were by no means the first. The Spanish, the Portuguese, the Dutch and (much earlier) the Indonesians all beat Britain to the flag. The waters around Australia were, from the 1600s on, a hotbed of navigators, explorers, traders — and sailors who were just plain lost.

      Macassan fishermen

      Macassar was a port on the island of Sulawesi, part of what is today Indonesia, and the centre of a thriving trade in sea cucumbers (also known as trepang, or beche-de-mer). These were considered a pretty wild delicacy in China as an aphrodisiac — think an early version of modern-day Viagra (or perhaps don’t) — and they were plentiful in the shallow seas along the coast of northern Australia between Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory and the Kimberleys in Western Australia.

      Because plenty of profit could be had from feeding heavy Chinese demand, every year from at least the 1720s on (but probably earlier) Macassan fishermen would sail their boats with the monsoon winds down to Australia. Here they’d stay for about half a year, catching, gutting, boiling, drying and smoking trepang before sailing back to Macassar with a full cargo.

      The Macassans camped onshore each summer, and built big fireplaces for large iron pots and cauldrons to boil the trepang. Afterwards, the trepang would be buried in sand to help them dry. (If you’ve ever been in Australia’s top end during the sultry monsoonal summer months, you’ll understand why they had to be buried to get properly dried!). They’d then be smoked in bamboo sheds the Macassans had built for the purpose.

      

Throughout their visits to Australia, Macassans interacted constantly with the local Aboriginals, who began to paint distinctive Macassan images — of the boats or of steel knives — in their rock art. Relations weren’t always rosy — outbursts of violence and retaliation occurred periodically — but, for the most part, the interactions were punctuated by exchange. Tobacco, pipes, the new technique of dugout canoe-making, new words, steel knives and axes were all things Indigenous Australian tribes acquired from the Macassans (as well as smallpox, unfortunately). In turn, Macassans were given access to the trepang resource, and were allowed to take some Aboriginal women as wives.

      Portuguese and Spanish navigators

      In the 1400s and 1500s, Portuguese and Spanish ships established a trading supremacy throughout the world, with colonies and ports established in Asia, India, China, Africa and both North and South America. It was only a matter of time before they started looking around in the part of the world where Australia was, too. Spanish and Portuguese navigators went looking — and almost discovered Australia.

      

The Spanish were already prominent around the rim of the Pacific Ocean — in the Philippines, Chile, Peru, Mexico and California — while the Portuguese were in and around the Indian Ocean with stations at East Timor, Aceh, Goa and east Africa.

      A Portuguese fellow by the name of Pedro Fernandez de Quiros led an expedition to find the ‘unknown southern land’ in 1605, and in 1606 he thought he’d found it — but it turned out to be the Pacific island of Vanuatu. Heading back, disappointed, the fleet got separated in a storm and de Quiros’s second in command, a Spaniard, Fernando Torres, led the bulk of the fleet to the Philippines.

      En route, Torres was the first to find a passage between Papua New Guinea and Australia (the strait is now called Torres Strait). Torres and his fleet saw the northern part of what is now Queensland (Cape York) but he didn’t realise it. Assuming it was just another island, Torres sailed on.

      Lost Dutch traders and wandering explorers

      Most of the trade, loot and riches that came from the New World of North and South America in the 1400s and 1500s were divided up between Portugal and Spain. However, in the 1600s a new heavyweight started muscling itself in on the global scene. This was Holland, which had managed to fight a successful war of independence against the Spanish.

      In the 1600s, the Dutch began running successful trade operations of their own, setting up new trading stations and pioneering new navigation courses. One of the new routes ran right past the western coast of Australia — sometimes too close. The history of Dutch encounters with Australia can be summed up with a loud ‘bump’ noise, followed by a surprised ‘What was that?!’ and ending with ‘Oh — Australia’ (or rather, ‘New Holland’).

The Dutch dominated much of the shipping trade in and around Europe, distributing the spices and goods that Portugal was bringing in to their ports. The Spanish, well and truly miffed at the Dutch not wanting to be governed by Spain anymore, decided to cut them out of this trade at the start of the 1600s. The Dutch retaliated by smuggling in some secret Portuguese maps of the known world and setting off to establish a little trading supremacy of their own. At this they were spectacularly successful. They moved especially into the East Indies (modern-day Indonesia), setting up a trading company with an administrative centre in Batavia (modern-day Jakarta). The Dutch soon established a monopoly in the European trade of cloves, nutmegs, cinnamon and pepper, from which they made bucketloads of money.

      Setting up an administrative centre in modern-day Jakarta created one problem for the Dutch: The time it took to sail from Europe to the East Indies was incredibly long. If you think 24 hours is a long time to put up with flying in a plane from Amsterdam to Jakarta, imagine multiplying it by 364. A round-trip in a 17th-century sailing ship took a year. Then, by accident, the Dutch discovered the roaring forties. This

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