Let the Land Speak

by Jackie French

  Only another extraordinary coincidence would enable the first colonial expedition to survive.

  The three great myths of Australian history

  There were three immutable facts of primary school history until relatively recently, and they still survive in Australian consciousness: Captain Cook discovered Australia in 1770; Blaxland, Wentworth and Lawson were the first people to find a way across the Blue Mountains in 1813, thus unleashing centuries of sheep and settlers west of the Divide; and the early New South Wales colony starved.

  None are true. Indigenous clans had been crossing the mountains for tens of thousands of years; William Wentworth may even have been told the approximate path to take by his Indigenous friends. The colony never starved. And Captain Cook (whose rank was really lieutenant, although he was captain of his ship) didn’t discover Australia. He had a copy of a centuries-old map showing exactly where Australia was and how he could follow its coast to Batavia (Jakarta) after the Endeavour was badly damaged by Antarctic gales while hunting for a different, and mythical, land in the southern Pacific Ocean.

  Australia’s existence was known to traders and navigators in the northern hemisphere for hundreds or even thousands of years before Cook – it was a great big lump of land down south beyond the Spice Islands. Even the earliest world map we know of, made by Ptolemy of Alexandria in the second century, had a great southern continent. While some maps plonked land in the southern expanse of ocean to ‘balance’ all the land in the north, many gave a reasonable approximation of where Australia was relative to Indonesia, and even of the northern coastline.

  The Indigenous nations of northern Australia traded prized ‘Darwin glass’ knives, as well as tools, feathers and exotic birds and animals through the Torres Strait islands and eventually north into Southeast Asia. There are anecdotal reports of a wallaby at a Beijing zoo in the 1600s, and of brightly feathered Australian birds. But none of the eager nations establishing colonies or annexing land or ports in Africa, the Americas, the Indian subcontinent, China, Southeast Asia and the Pacific seemed to want to establish a trading port here.

  Why not? The most treasured trading lands in the world were only a few days’ sail north of Australia: the Spice Islands (now part of Indonesia). Their rich crops of nutmeg, cloves, mace, pepper and cinnamon had been traded for thousands of years by Chinese, Javanese, Indian, Japanese, Cambodian and Siamese (Thai) merchants, followed by the Arab traders. Eventually the spices made their way to Europe to be sold at astronomical prices.

  Look at the celebration foods of England and you see Southeast Asian spices: plum pudding, rich in cinnamon and mixed spice, a scrape of nutmeg on the custard, spiced fruit cake, gingerbread, spiced lardy cake. Europe learnt to treasure spices in the Crusades, from 1096 onwards, as European Christian kings tried to take Jerusalem and the Holy Land from the armies of their Islamic enemies (and also sometimes accidentally, and sometimes on purpose, from other Christians too). In the process they made themselves small, temporary Middle Eastern fiefdoms – and developed a love of spices. Spices made bland food fun. Many also inhibited the rots that could turn stored food deadly. A small bag of pepper could be a knight’s fee for a year of work.

  Once you were in the general area of the Spice Islands, northern Australia would be hard to miss from the crow’s nest on top of a mast, as would smoke on the horizon. Logically, it would be worth exploring south to see if this land had spices too.

  It does: a true pepper (Piper spp.), native ginger, lemon myrtle (Backhousia citriodora), the pepper-like Tasmannia spp., and hundreds of others, all as richly fragrant as those from the Spice Islands. The Dutch and Portuguese found valuable sandalwood too. The monsoonal climate of northern Australia would also have made it suitable to grow plantations of spices to break the existing trading monopolies. Captain Jonathon Carnes would successfully break the European trading monopoly in 1798 when he traded directly with Sumatra to take his first cargo of pepper back to Salem in the United States. The monopolies for sugar, tea and pineapple would also be broken by establishing plantations in other lands. Northern Australia’s soil and climate would have been – and still is – suitable for new plantations of spices, tea, coffee, sugar and other wealth-making crops of the era.

  Australia also has gold. Admittedly, the local inhabitants hadn’t turned the gold into easily stolen treasure troves, but some of those who came here would have recognised granite outcrops as being potentially gold-bearing. There were also vast amounts of iron ore, although the biggest deposits wouldn’t be noticed until a small plane carrying the stubborn and far-sighted Lang Hancock accidentally landed on them in the 1960s.

  Most temptingly of all, you’d think, the west of Australia was thinly populated, with often friendly inhabitants and no other colonial power in occupation – an excellent place to establish a supply port for the ships that had crossed the Indian Ocean on the strong trade winds and were then heading towards the rich trading lands north of Australia. From the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, a third of a ship’s crew might die from scurvy because of lack of fresh food. Supply ports were vital.

  But a supply port needs safe harbour for ships, and northern and western Australia didn’t seem to have any that were sheltered enough for sailing ships to survive cyclones and tropical storms at anchor, nor any large rivers where sailing ships could shelter either.

  Australia does have a few superb harbours, but they aren’t obvious. This is an old country. Its few large rivers have carved out giant harbours but, like Sydney Harbour and Moreton Bay – both of which Cook sailed past without realising their true extent – many are hidden, protected by almost impassable reefs, islands or narrow openings. The small, high-prowed boats of the Indonesian trepang fisherman, who visited the northern coast from about the mid-seventeenth century, could pull their smaller, lighter craft out of the water onto the beaches. But the large European trading ships had to anchor well offshore in deep water, with the sailors coming to land in small rowboats, unless a pier had been built out into the sea to make loading and unloading easier. No harbour meant no exploration or trade.

  Western Australia’s best harbour, at what is now Albany, was too far south for most ships riding the westerly trade winds before they turned north to the Spice Islands.

  And not only were there no obvious harbours but the long golden beaches of Western Australia with their strong surf and almost constant high westerly winds made it difficult to send ships’ boats in to look for water – or, at least, to get back to their ship again easily through surf and against the wind. Few sailors could swim, so an upturned ship’s boat in the surf was likely to be fatal. Much of the northern coast of Australia is edged with high cliffs, and the coast north of what is now Perth edged with sand dunes, impossible to see what the land beyond the sand is like. Further north are the rocky islands and the reefs that are now superb marine parks but, back then, meant danger.

  Even those high winds that drove the ships towards the coast were a danger. Sailing ships are powered by the wind, but the interplay of sails and rudder means that experienced sailors don’t need to go where the wind pushes them: for instance they can manoeuvre north with a westerly wind blowing or tack into a head wind, sailing east into a westerly. But if the wind is too strong – and the trade winds of the southwest can be strong enough to blow you over – you will run out of room to tack and jibe once you are too close to a lee shore. Experienced sailors knew not to get too close to Western Australia, or any lee shore, where the currents as well as the wind might drive you onto rocks or cliffs.

  But there was an even more important factor in the delayed European colonisation than the lack of safe harbours: that lack of grass. The western coast that was surveyed by the Dutch and Portuguese was either desert or tussock or button grass – good for browsing wallabies, but not for grazing animals like cattle – or its ground covers were toxic to stock. Many of the early Western Australian colony’s animals would die before the toxic plants were identified.
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  Australia may have been a superb staging point for ships to restock after they’d made the trek across the ocean from Europe and were heading up to Batavia. But without safe harbours, there was no way to do so. And without grass, there was no point.

  If it weren’t for the produce supplied by livestock kept on board, a ship’s crew would have to survive on salted and dried rations or whatever fish they could catch. Sailors shanghaied while they were drunk (a common way to find a crew in most European ports) might eat salt beef or pork so salty it blistered their lips and ship’s biscuit that crawled with weevils – they had little choice if they wanted to stay on the ship long enough to reach their home port again. But the captain, lieutenants, mates, ship’s master and surgeon, all of whom were responsible for the ship and her crew, expected far better food. Their own stores provided dried fruit, puddings and port, but they needed fresh meat too, from pigs, sheep and small cattle, as well as milk from goats and eggs from hens.

  And these animals needed feeding. Men can live on concentrates like salt beef and biscuit for about three months until they begin to die of scurvy. Herbivores need hay daily, a bulky food that easily becomes mouldy in damp sea air. Mouldy hay kills your stock.

  You need grass.

  Every time there was an opportunity, ships would anchor and the men row ashore, hunting first for fresh water for themselves as well as the animals, laboriously filling barrels then lugging them back in the rowboats to their ship. After that they cut grass, turning it in the sunlight to dry before raking it into large bundles called ‘stooks’ and carrying it, load after load, back to the animals.

  If a ship stayed in one place long enough the animals might be taken ashore to eat the grass, although this too was hard work. It is easy enough to get a cow down a gangplank, but the mind boggles at transporting even a goat in a small rowing boat. But that is what you had to do to survive the months, or even years, at sea.

  No harbours, no grass: Australia didn’t seem to be able to provide even the basics. But there was another factor, too.

  To European eyes, good land meant green vegetation divided into farms. Riches came from fertile farmland, or the jungle-like vegetation of Ceylon, the Philippines, Java and Malaysia. To them, sand and sparse vegetation meant desert, unproductive and useless. They had no experience of cultures that had adapted to the very different land of Western Australia.

  Wealth also came from a population that could be either enslaved or at least harnessed to work cheaply. (To some extent it still does. Many of us possibly don’t care to examine how our cheap clothes, telecentres or growing superannuation accounts may be based on employing people so desperate that they’ll accept starvation wages.) The Indigenous nations’ lack of full-time armies may have put them at a disadvantage when they needed to fight for their land. But their lack of obvious armies or groups of obedient workers supervised by an employer, overseer, priest or similar may also have helped them live relatively undisturbed by empires from over the seas for a surprisingly long time.

  A thousand years of secrecy and vanished history

  History is known by the records left to us. Australia has a long and complex history, but there are few written records before Governor Phillip’s colony of convicts arrived in 1788.

  Much of our history vanished with the oral traditions of the Indigenous nations. The coastal clans were the ones who would have seen and recorded contact with visitors from China, Southeast Asia and Europe. But these coastal clans were also most vulnerable to the whaling and sealer camps of the 1800s, where whole clans were wiped out – the men killed, the women kidnapped or, in some cases, going willingly as wives. It’s worth noting though that Cook and many others were startled when the Indigenous people showed so little surprise at their ships. This lack of jumping up and down and yelling the equivalent of ‘look at that’ may have been a form of politeness. But it might also have been because this wasn’t the first time the onlookers had seen sailing ships.

  How much Australian history lies under the sea? Australia’s coastline is liberally scattered with rocks, rips and reefs. It is also large and relatively unpopulated. Until the late nineteenth century ships had no way of sending distress calls; flares would only be seen by ships that were close at hand or people on the coast nearby. Roughly (and this is probably an underestimation) a third of ships would vanish before they were retired as unseaworthy. Even in the thoroughly explored Mediterranean, new shipwrecks from ancient Greek and Roman times are still being discovered. It is possible, even likely, that there are more early wrecks undiscovered about Australia’s coast. It is also likely that other sailing ships in the past thousand years may have sighted the Australian coast but were wrecked or foundered elsewhere before the navigators could pass that knowledge on.

  Between about 1400 and 1800 there was also an obsessive secrecy about trade routes. A map was not just useful – it might make your fortune, or your employer’s. If the enemy did not know your route – perhaps through a reef, between islands or using favourable winds and currents – they couldn’t follow you, either to attack or take your trade.

  It wasn’t just nations that kept their secrets. Navigators owned not only their skill but their store of maps, both those written and the even more secret ones they consigned to memory alone (though even memory might be plundered if the Inquisition wanted to know your routes). A good navigator could trade his knowledge for high wages but also for a share of profits. The best navigators could grow even wealthier than captains – assuming they survived. And if they did, it was the navigators’ skills that took them there, and back.

  This secrecy makes reconstructing explorations of the ocean difficult. We know that maps that show at least a blob of land in the right place for Australia exist. We don’t know how many navigators knew of their existence at the time. The maps might even have been based on hearsay: the natives say there is a large land to the south. A map showing a land blob roughly where Australia happens to be doesn’t mean that anyone actually came here. Alternatively, ship after ship may have come here and left no sign.

  As I write this the discovery of Arab coins on the Wessel Islands, north of Australia, has aroused speculation that Arab traders, too, may have visited Australia. For hundreds of years – and possibly millennia – pepper, nutmeg, and cloves from the Indies and cinnamon from Sri Lanka had been taken to various centres like Malacca and Amboina. Arab traders were among those who took these to the Eastern Mediterranean, for further distribution. Did an enterprising Arab trader decide to head for the source of the wealth? (If a future archaeologist finds my hunks of French flint here in five hundred years’ time, I wonder if they will speculate about the possibility of a Neolithic voyage from France to Australia, carrying enough flint to light their fires.)

  So much is unknown. Even the maps are open to interpretation. While many ancient maps showed a Great South Land, it may have been added simply because the map makers assumed that the land in the north needed to be balanced by a southern land mass – especially when they showed a Terra Australis Incognita extending all the way to Antarctica.

  Some early maps, like the one drawn by Henry VIII’s map maker, Jean Rotz, in 1542, do show a reasonably realistic outline of the northern parts of Australia, like Cape York and parts of Arnhem Land, the areas that would have been most accessible to ships sailing around what is now Indonesia, the Philippines and Malaysia. French maps of 1540 and 1570 show a Java la Grande (Large Java) below the present Indonesia, and again there are some similarities between those and the northern coast. In all other details they are inaccurate. But it is possible that the knowledge of northern Australian geography didn’t come from European explorers but from Southeast Asian and Chinese traders.

  A continent in China’s backyard

  The history Australians learn at school is still strongly Eurocentric. Even today, an Australian school child is more likely to know of King Henry VIII and his six wives than any of the Chinese emperors. Yet for most of the past few t
housand years China was a more powerful nation than England, and far closer to Australia. By the sixth century AD the Chinese knew of a land where men threw boomerangs and animals hopped on their hind legs. In the ninth century, Chinese fleets took control of the spice trade from the Arabs. Chinese maps of the thirteenth century show the land of Greater Java below Java – possibly the northern part of Australia.3 According to Marco Polo (an often unreliable witness), thirteenth-century China had 3000-ton ships, with crews of several hundred men, sailing between China, Java and India. Thousand-ton ships are more likely, given the accounts in the next two centuries, but it’s very possible that Chinese ships were indeed already trading as far south as Java.

  By 1403 the new Emperor, Yung-lo, had an army of more than a million men, armed with guns. (Henry V’s celebrated army at Agincourt in 1415 was only five thousand men with longbows and arrows, minuscule and primitive compared to the might of China.) Yung-lo’s navy had more than a three thousand war ships, as well as two hundred and fifty ‘treasure ships’ each capable of carrying more than two thousand tons of cargo. Europe’s biggest cargo fleet in Venice had only three hundred ships, the largest capable of carrying fifty tons of cargo.

  China had traditionally conquered by land, not sea, but Yung-lo was an expansionist. He appointed his grand eunuch Zheng He commander-in-chief of the world’s largest collection of fleets, to collect tribute from the barbarians and bring Confucian harmony to the earth, as well as to explore for minerals and collect new plants for medicine or foods. From about 1404–1433 Chinese fleets made seven voyages to Java, Myanmar, India, Sri Lanka, Arabia, Timor and east Africa. One of the fleets may have possibly reached South America (which would explain how Southeast Asian hens arrived there, though there are other equally likely explanations) and Antarctica. It’s possible that one of the fleets reached Australia – surely they would have been curious about the large land to the South of Timor – but no definitive evidence has been put forward. After a series of natural disasters, Yung-lo’s successors concentrated on projects like large granaries to help prevent starvation at home, rather than expansion abroad. Nearly all the records of the voyages were destroyed.