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Not Just the Tudors
When Europeans reached Australia
00:46:01
What were the far-reaching consequences of first contact between indigenous Australians and Europeans?
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- [00:00]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb. If you'd like Not Just the Tudors ad free to get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to historyhit with a historyhit subscription. You can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my own on Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn, Brilliant Rivals, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com subscribe.
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Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And so they should, because everyone draws from different influences. Parents, peers, politics, education, media, culture. What you believe depends on who you believe. Financial Times readers know that their opinions are reliable because they're shaped by trusted journalism. Robust opinions, confident decisions. Source FT to subscribe, go to FT.comSourceSource FT hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb, and welcome to Not Just the Tudors From History Hit the podcast in which we explore everything from Anne Boleyn to the Aztecs, from Holbein to the Huguenots, from Shakespeare to samurais, relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage and witchcraft. Not, in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. It's February 1606. A small ship of the Dutch East India Company called the Dufkin, or Little Dove, is cutting through the waves of the unexplored waters of the southern seas southeast of the Spice Island. At its helm stands Wilhelm Janzoon, a seasoned navigator with the Dutch East India Company. Suddenly, land appears on the horizon. Janzoon thinks it must be a southern extension of New guinea, but he is mistaken. This is the western coast of what is now known as the Cape York Peninsula in Queensland, Australia. The ship drops anchor, and Janzoon leads a small party ashore on the 26th of February. But this strange new land is not uninhabited. Watching from the shadows of the dense coastal vegetation are the Wick people. For thousands of years, they've lived here undisturbed. Now they're face to face with these strangers from across the sea. With their pale skin and strange clothing, they must seem like creatures from another world. But the immediate curiosity does not last long. A misunderstanding? A gesture misinterpreted? Or perhaps just the clash of two vastly different worlds. Whatever the cause, conflict erupts. When the dust settles, there are casualties on both sides. Janzun quickly sets sail from the area, naming it Cape Turnaround. For the Wick, this violent encounter becomes a part of their oral history, a stark reminder of the moment when strangers came from the sea. Their land has forever been changed by this brief presence. Janzoon has become the first European to set foot on Australian soil. A new chapter in Australia's history has begun, one that will see centuries of conflict and misunderstanding between its indigenous inhabitants and Europeans. Joining me today to explore further the story of Europeans reaching Australia is Professor Alistair Patterson from the University of Western Australia in Perth, an expert in historical archaeology in maritime and terrestrial settings and European colonization. I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb, and this is not just the Tudors from History Hit. Alistair, welcome to the podcast.
- [04:46]
Professor Alistair Patterson
Thank you so much. I just like to acknowledge that I'm speaking to you guys today from Perth, Western Australia, which is where I live and work on the Whadjuk people's country of the Noongar Nation.
- [04:59]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Thank you for that. Can I start by asking you what we now know about how long Aboriginal people have lived in Australia?
- [05:10]
Professor Alistair Patterson
Well, that is something that continues to develop, but over the decades through radiocarbon dating and then other forms of direct dating. And we've really advanced the kind of the antiquity, the deep time history of the continent. And so now it's sitting just over 60,000 years, with a range of dates sitting comfortably at 50,000 years all around the continent, from the coasts to the southern tip of Tasmania. So we have an extraordinary deep time continental history that's emerged through archeology. It's been a great revolution, really.
- [05:44]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And what sort of evidence are you uncovering as archaeologists that tell us about them?
- [05:49]
Professor Alistair Patterson
Those older sites, typically stratified deposits. So they're in the kinds of places like rock shelters and cave deposits, where the archaeological record is more likely to be trapped in sediments and survive. And so they're the places where we have our older sites, places like Devil's Lair, just south of where I am here in Western Australia. Barrow Island Booty Cave on Barrow island on the far western coast of that island. And sites like Mudjababi, which provides a date sitting around 65,000 years. So some really extraordinarily ancient dates.
- [06:24]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Yes, absolutely. And fascinating that this is a history that's in the process of being rewritten as these new discoveries are made. And that fundamentally changes our assumptions about human history, really, when we think about.
- [06:39]
Professor Alistair Patterson
The history of our species, you know, Homo sapiens sapien, and we look around the world and you think, well, you know, Australia is basically unoccupied as a continent until the arrival at that period of time by modern humans, the ancestors of Aboriginal people today. And so, you know, if we look around the world at this, in the past, we might have looked, for instance, to the Paleolithic in Europe for comparison. But of course, that happens later. So modern humans are only really reaching in to Europe well after these events have happened here in Australia. And the other thing which is extraordinary really about Australia is that it's always been an island continent. So when people came here at that time, it's very, very probable that they came with a maritime technology. And so we start to think about, well, what are those ancient humans really about? How did they engage with other human humans that they met along the way with the discovery, for instance, of other humans in Flores in recent decades and other places in Asia, what's that interaction like? Similar to what happened with Neanderthals in Europe. So there are so many questions that continue to emerge from the archeology about being human. As a result of the archeology, it's a very exciting time, really.
- [07:55]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So we're going to be talking about something relatively recent in the last 400 or so years, the first encounters between Europeans and Aboriginals, and naturally, these were taking place mostly at the coast. And do we have evidence about how native inhabitants to Australia or the Aboriginal peoples were interacting with the flora, the fauna, the vegetation around the coast? What do we know about their lives.
- [08:24]
Professor Alistair Patterson
If we look at that fairly recent period? So in recent centuries, when Europeans and Asians came into contact with Australia and thus Aboriginal people, we've had this extraordinary, you know, human occupation. There's a wonderful map of Australia showing all of the language groups. So we have over 200 distinct language groups with their own cultures. And so there's a rich tapestry of diversity, just as we see elsewhere in the world people speaking utterly different languages, having different systems of belief and all that diversity as well. We know a lot about the life from, I guess, the archaeology of the Holocene, you know, the recent few thousand years, because the archaeology is more recent, it's better preserved, and coastal sites and open sites and. And so it's a fairly rich record. And equally Aboriginal memory is a huge part of that. And it now appears, for instance, that, you know, that there are stories of environmental events, for instance, the rising of the seas after the Ice Age, that are remembered in distinct locations, at least six locations around Australia. So there's a potential, even in indigenous knowledge and Aboriginal peoples kind of oral traditions for stories that extend back thousands of years as well. So we have a couple of different ways in which we can understand how people interacted with their plates, their environment, their country.
- [09:40]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So we've dashed through 65,000 years there, and we're going to linger slightly more from the 16th century onwards. There are theories that the Portuguese were the first Europeans to site Australia, possibly even to land on it. Tell me about that. What evidence is there of it?
- [09:59]
Professor Alistair Patterson
Yeah, there's long been a belief that Portuguese were the first Europeans to encounter the Australian continent. And there's two kind of parts to this. One is the idea of a great southern land. And so since the time of Ptolemy, there'd been this idea of a southern continent. I mean, Ptolemy's thinking, you know, this hypothetical southern land kind of balanced the world and enclosed what we now call the Indian Ocean as well. And that kind of idea of an enclosed, massive land occurred on many maps and, of course, into the medieval world maps, kind of realities as well as kind of imaginings. And we see that presence of fictitious creatures and other things as well. And lands that have been perhaps described, but not necessarily are actually known of, and particularly the influence of Marco Polo. His published travels include references to lands that he'd heard about south of Thailand and other places as well. And so we've got these kind of ideas and place names knocking around, I think, a lot of maps of that area. But the real kind of driver for the Portuguese hypothesis, if you like, is really coming from a series of maps, the deeper maps, as they're called. So maps that are published in the Netherlands, but really must rely to some degree on knowledge of Portuguese cartography. And the Portuguese were the first to arrive into the Indian Ocean. So they're entering into the Indian Ocean after 1488, when Diaz makes his way around the southern tip of Africa and upwards along The African coast to India and Sri Lanka and into the Spice Islands. And so the Portuguese are present in this part of the world. They're deeply secretive and so there's no reason for their maps to be really widely known. So the deeper maps, which are a set of maps that basically published from 1530 through to 1560, some of which have survived, some that have been described but did not survive, do describe over time, this southern land, there's various names that are applied to it, including, you know, Greater Java Beach, Lorac as well. And so we have these kind of places. Mal is another one. And they're pretty well drawing from Marco Polo, most, most of those names. And when you look at the map, it's in the right place for it to be Australia. And so, and it's kind of, kind of the right size, a big landmass, much bigger than the islands of Southeast Asia. Disappointingly, there's no evidence at all, material evidence of the Portuguese ever making it to Australia. There's a lot of things that have been described as evidence. One example was the discovery of cannons, small bronze cannons in Napier, Broom Bay, Carronade, which later turned out to be made in Makassar. So they're kind of imitations of kind of Portuguese and Dutch cannons and other things. A hypothetical shipwreck, the mahogany shipwreck in Victoria, right down the bottom of the continent. And then people have looked at the outline of some of these maps and felt that they, you know, bringing it all together, they could actually come together to form Australia. But you could probably create any continent by pulling together bits and pieces of some of these earlier maps as well. So the current thinking really is that long standing tradition of the southern continent and its various names really comes more from Ptolemy and later misunderstandings of the globe rather than any firm evidence of the Portuguese. But of course they were in Southeast Asia, but no firm evidence, I'm afraid.
- [13:47]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
What about the Spanish? There's a theory, isn't there, that the Spanish might have established a colony around Botany bay in the 16th century. Is there any better evidence for that?
- [13:56]
Professor Alistair Patterson
There is no evidence for that. So the Spanish are fascinating because as listeners will recall, of course, you know, the world is really divided between the Portuguese and, and the Spanish. And the Portuguese are basically making their way into Asia and, you know, kind of the profits of the Spice Islands from, from Africa and from that side of the Indian Ocean. Whilst the other side of the equation is, of course the Spanish moving across the Atlantic into the Americas. Columbus's, you know, quite famous miscalculation of the size of the globe. And so that kind of sense that having arrived in America, that actually arrived in Australia. So even though it takes Diaz's entry into the Indian Ocean in 1488, Magellan is several decades later. So it's only, you know, in the 1520s that we finally see the Spanish entering into the Pacific. And there's a whole raft of expeditions across the Pacific. Magellan obviously kickstarts the voyage, which is the first European voyage to circumnavigate the world. And so they're really, most of those voyages and early voyages are coming across the northern part of the Pacific, quite often not encountering any land. But there are a series of encounters by the Spanish with islands such as the Solomon Islands and Espirito Santo, which is in Vanuatu today, that happened in the early 1500s. So it's those expeditions that people have looked at and said, okay, well, we had the Portuguese to the north, we have this landmass, we're starting to see these, the shape of it developing. The Spanish are there as well. There's no direct evidence that the Spanish ever did make it further south and were able to encounter the east coast of Australia. They're certainly encountering places up New guinea, and Magellan ends up in the Philippines. So further north, but no evidence of the Spanish in Australia.
- [15:45]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So is there any evidence of contact between indigenous peoples and Europeans prior to the Dutch?
- [15:54]
Professor Alistair Patterson
There's no contact between Europeans and Aboriginal Australians, but of course there are forms of contact all along northern Australia that are occurring with Southeast Asians. And so that story has become increasingly better known in Australia and over recent decades. And again, archaeology as well as aboriginal kind of oral histories really do come together in really powerful ways to reveal that history. And it is a history that relates to Europeans because, you know, with the Portuguese and the Dutch in Southeast Asia, you know, pitting themselves against each other as well as kind of forming alliances with particularly Muslim policies as well. They basically have really confined and controlled most of the trade of commodities throughout the archipelago. And so there were very few commodities available for, for instance, I guess, your average seafaring coastal dwelling people that weren't subject to particularly Dutch control and fees and port fees and what have you. And so one of the products that emerged as a really viable tradable commodity was trepang. So trepang is a sea cucumber, polytheria species. So it's kind of a. It's a fairly unattractive slug like creature that spent its life in shallow, warm waters off northern Australia and yet became Increasingly in demand, particularly in China, where it was. It was valued for food and other medicinal properties. And so what we now know is that, you know, from the last recent centuries, probably as early as 1500 onwards, we see increasing numbers of fleets of prow, so the indigenous sailing craft of island Southeast Asians coming down from places, particularly from Makassar, which is in the main settlement in Sulawesi, to various locations across northern Australia and on the monsoon. So coming down and spending months, basically located on beaches and offshore islands, processing tray pain. And there's an incredibly rich set of interactions that occur as a result, and they're historical. You know, this is an industry. So really, if you want, Australia's first industry is not European, it's actually Asian. And so we're looking at sites, for instance, in the Kimberley where there's been much less archaeology done. And we've in the process of dating those sites back to, oh, the 1600s. But elsewhere in Arnhem Land, you know, rock art images of these boats have actually been dated as well, using direct dating methods to around the early 1500s. And so we have these extraordinary things happening and, you know, in Aboriginal coastal cultures, particularly in Arnhem Land, Groot Island, Whistle Islands, Gulf of Carpentaria and the Kimberley, this has resulted in, you know, exchange of words, exchange of ideas, exchange of technology, like the dugout canoe, fishing hooks. It really was a radical set of encounters that changed Aboriginal coastal peoples at least dramatically. And that happened before Europeans basically encountered most of these places, or at least at the same time, some of these very early Dutch arrivals.
- [19:19]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Do we know whether the Dutch were encountering the people who were harvesting the trepang? Can we find that connection?
- [19:26]
Professor Alistair Patterson
No accounts by the Dutch of traip hanging. And we shouldn't be surprised by this because, or for two reasons. One is, you know, the ways in which the Dutch encountered Australia was either through accident and we can, you know, explore how that happens, or in a process of looking for what the voc, the Dutch East India Company, so highly valued. And that was, you know, the potential to make money, to actually for economic opportunity. And so, you know, a lot of those early Dutch captains are basically told, you know, talk to people, find out where their gold and silver is, follow them to their mines and discover all you can around their wealth. And so Australia did not play out that way. There were no gold and silver lines ready for the Dutch and, you know, coastal encounters. Aboriginal people quite often avoided a lot of these arrivals as well, and also network people as well. So the Dutch pretty quickly were uninterested in the opportunities of the potential of Australia, despite obviously attempting to systematically explore it during the 1600s. The other thing is that there aren't that many Europeans floating around in Northern Australia. So those seasonal. The north is so vast, and it's only really in the 1800s with the French. Peron Bourdin's expedition in 1802 encounters a whole fleet of vessels coming down from Makassar and off Cassini island off the Kimberley coast, and he's amazed to meet them. And equally, Matthew Flinders in Northern Australia meets and actually boards one of these vessels and just learns that they've been regularly coming down to northern Australia and that Aboriginal people actually went back to Macassar on some of these vessels and there was intermarriage. And so I think the Europeans just are tiny little moments in time to encounter something which is happening on an annual basis across a very, very vast territory.
- [21:24]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So when the Dutch land in 1606, possibly, as you say, accidentally, they have this documented and oral history account with the WIC people. What do we know about the wic?
- [21:39]
Professor Alistair Patterson
So, the WIC people basically describe several groups of separate language groups occupying the lands of Cape York. And so obviously, these encounters occurred on the western side of Cape York, so kind of the Gulf of Carpenteria side. And so they would have met with one of the coastal groups. So there's several coastal groups as well as several groups that occupy inland that kind of are defined by the WIC people. And so, you know, there's been heaps of work done on the WIC people during the eventual arrival of kind of the colonial era. There, there's a lot more movement of people. But, you know, in a place such as Cape York, where pastoralism arrives fairly late, you know, there's a lot of deep connection of Whig people to countries. So we're pretty confident that, you know, Whig people understand fairly well their country and the places that are described by the Dutch when they arrived there in 1606 at Cape Kiwi.
- [22:33]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And was there conflict from the beginning or were there any kind of Koru overtures, any attempts at trading or.
- [22:40]
Professor Alistair Patterson
Yeah, in the absence of any indigenous, you know, strong account of that, you know, we have the Dutch account, and we know that, you know, that there was violence. And, you know, the Dutch description of that is a little bit unclear about how it came about. It's not unusual in a lot of these encounters where people arrive in one place or on one beach and things go pretty well, and then they come back and the situation deteriorates and sometimes leads to violence, as it did in the case of Cape Kieweir, where at least one Dutchman was attacked and several aboriginal people as well. So unfortunate first encounter? Perhaps, but perhaps not an unsurprising one given the history of contact. It's interesting to Note that in 1606 when this happens, there's also another expedition that goes through Torres Strait, and that is several months later. And in that case that was another VOC ship and they kidnapped, I believe, something like 20 people. So you know that you can imagine that some of these just so that they could basically take them back to Batavia, perhaps even intend to take them back to Europe, which was a tradition of grabbing indigenous people and trying to parade them in the courts of Europe. And so there's many different ways in which I suspect encounters in places like Torres Strait or the Australian coast can go terribly wrong as well.
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- [26:16]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And given what you've said about Dutch motives, money making, basically, is that where we need to look to understand why the Dutch don't seem to be interested in establishing colonies in Australia?
- [26:30]
Professor Alistair Patterson
It's very interesting. Of course, Australia has long been known as New Holland. And, you know, the continent is littered with Dutch names that kind of come from the many points of intentional and accidental contact with the continent. So there are certainly opportunities for the Dutch to have made a more permanent presence. There was a wonderful expedition that occurred along the southern coast of the continent, along what is now southern part of Western Australia, the Nullarbor, the Great Australian Bight, ending up near Ceduna in South Australia just a couple of years before the Batavia events are happening in the 1620s. And at the end of that, they actually had a fairly positive experience and did suggest that the Dutch establish a colony like this where South Australia is now. But nothing came of that. And then equally, Abel Tasman is directed from Batavia to basically explore the continent and does so in 1642 and again in 1644. And during those expeditions, he arrives and he's the first European to describe the southern parts of Tasmania. And so you have all of these Dutch names and French names from labor expeditions around Tasmania. But he actually does actually land and claim Proclamation Point, actually claims part of the land. But there is really no eventual attempt by the Dutch to settle in Australia. And you would imagine that looking again at the monetary delivery of what was happening during the 1600s and 1700s in Southeast Asia, with the profits being made by the vac from the spice trade and other commodities, China and other things that basically were receiving what they were expecting to receive. And there was really no kind of colonizing interest from the Dutch at all.
- [28:22]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
But am I right in thinking they continued to chart the coastline?
- [28:26]
Professor Alistair Patterson
Yeah, in part for two reasons. One is earlier on to continue to, you know, see if there was a potential for resources and equally to prepare people for. To be able to travel more safely. Because in this era, you know, the great issue that was faced by the Dutch was, of course, one of the limits of navigation. So this is an era when latitude can be easily calculated but longitude less so. So the Dutch, again, like the Portuguese, are coming into the Indian Ocean around Africa. But unlike the Portuguese, they don't hug the African coast and follow the trade winds that slow route across the northern Indian Ocean. Instead, they follow a route known as the Brewers Route, which was established in 1611 by Captain Brewer. And they're basically following a very southern latitude across the Indian Ocean, kind of a fast track, before then heading north at a longitude that basically equates with today Jakarta, Batavia, which was the headquarter they established in the early 1600s. So the difficulty they faced, of course, was the determination of longitude. And so a slight miscalculation. And they're typically calculating it through estimating their speed and their direction, charting that on a daily basis and hoping that it all adds up. But of course, this is a fairly unpredictable way of calculating longitude. And as a result, some of them sailed far too close to the Australian continent and encountered it, leading to some obviously very famous events, shipwrecks, as well as the plotting of the coast. And so there are many vessels that encounter the West Australian coast in particular, make landfall, observe Aboriginal people, observe distant campfires, arrive in camps that have just been abandoned. Aboriginal people have kind of faded away and let them be. And so there are many instances of Dutch people on the West Australian coast, from Dirk Hartog in 1616 onwards. And so that's kind of a really exciting but pretty poorly understood part of Australia's continental history.
- [30:32]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And so I imagine the gathering of this information means that maps are evolving over the course of the 17th century, changing this sort of understanding of the world to include Australia.
- [30:43]
Professor Alistair Patterson
We talked a bit about, you know, this kind of idea of Terra Australis or this southern land. So Terra Australis incognita, you know, was kind of an idea that was obviously on these maps from ancient times. Then we really, with these Dutch encounters, really see the emergence of kind of, I think, New Holland. And so from, you know, like 1606 with Cape Kieweh and 1616 with De Carter, we really increasingly see, you know, the emergence of an understanding of the Australian continent, 1642-44, with Abel Tasman. He really then basically plots much of the southern continent. Tasmania, either of the coast of New Zealand doesn't encounter the Eastern seaboard. But then in 1644, that was a wonderful set of maps, following the same route as the Rustkin, really through Papua New guinea, down the Gulf of Carpentaria, again, not realizing that there was a passage through Torres Strait to the Pacific, and then mapping the Gulf of Carpentaria, Groot island and many of the islands of the north. So the Dutch actually have a. You know, they're the ones who really put Australia on the world map as New Holland.
- [31:50]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And you mentioned the shipwrecks. I mean, There are quite a number of famous shipwrecks in the 17th and early 18th centuries, aren't they? Could you tell us a little about those?
- [32:00]
Professor Alistair Patterson
Yes, well, I mean, the most famous is the Batavia, which I think the listeners are aware of. But the main shipwrecks are all in Western Australia and there's four that are known. So there's the Batavia from 1628, but there's also the Vugura dreck, which wrecked only about 130km north of where I am in Perth on the coast in the 1650s. And then in the 18th century, we have another wreck in the Abrolhos island where the Batavia had been wrecked. That's the wreck of the Zewick. And then later again in the 18th century, we have the Zeitgel wrecking on these horrific cliffs on the West Australian coast. So we have four shipwrecks and they were known of by the Dutch. And many of the voyages of expedition were attempts from Batavia to actually locate survivors better map hazards, particularly trial rocks, which was another known hazard issued where an East India. And the trial wreck in 1622, that's kind of the fifth ship, not Dutch, English. So we have these five wrecks that have all been discovered and all really led to the birth of Maripal archeology in Western Australia. And a really important kind of moment, I think, in terms of the global history of maritime archaeology. And those wrecks and their contents are actually here in Perth and continue to be worked upon. New sites continue to be discovered in the Abrolhos and on the West Australian coast. So they remain a really significant part of, I guess, the cultural heritage of Western Australia. But equally the Dutch, who are deeply committed to ongoing work on these sites and on these collections.
- [33:38]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So we've got this charting, we've got these sightings of the fires and we've got the shipwrecks. But really, after Tasman's voyages in the 1640s, we see Dutch interest in Australia waning. And I wondered to what extent you felt the lack of interest in Australia by the voc, the Dutch East India Company, opened the way for Britain's interest when we get into the 18th century.
- [34:07]
Professor Alistair Patterson
It's such an interesting question because it doesn't really get framed terribly well. I think in our national histories that what's happening in this period of time between kind of the growing navigation and nautical exploration power of both the French and then the British, and the ways in which these are really kind of the outwards expressions of what's happening obviously in Western Europe with these nations as well. And so there's a fascinating gulf, I believe, in a kind of the world in which the VOC was committed to, which was a world of commerce, you know, believing fiercely in God, but not really prosecuting a missionary agenda very strongly. So really a commercial and military exercise, particularly in island Southeast Asia with terrible events such as, you know, the annihilation of people in the Banda Islands so they can access nutmeg there more easily. You know, you do end up with a colonial presence, obviously the Dutch East Indies, you know, continues up until the Second World War, but there's not as strong a colonial drive in relation to Australia until the French and the English. And then we we're caught up then in the world of the Enlightenment, the birth of science, the radical shifts of improvement in navigation, particularly with the determination of longitude. That kind of fuels a really different set of expeditions that kind of characterize the late 1700s versus what's happening in the 1600s. It's just a really interesting shift, I think, in how Europeans view the world.
- [35:50]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Foreign.
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- [37:28]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
The most famous European expedition to Australia is of course that 164 years later from Yan Zoom sightings and to 1770 Captain Cook and as you say by that period of time. The world is very different. European goals in exploration, colonization are very different. Their outlook is different. What's primarily Cook's interest in exploring the.
- [37:55]
Professor Alistair Patterson
South Pacific, you know, Cook, as we've intimated, really is coming from a moment where we see a great shift towards a type of exploration that's fueled on filling in the missing corners of the world, but equally doing so in a way which is really inspired by a growing interest in science and a kind of a Cartesian and rational understanding of the world. If we just talk about those maps for a second, you know, we're thinking about those deeper maps where the world is, you know, the corners are filled with imaginations of creatures and kind of the unknown and this kind of very different understanding of the world to what we see in the 1700s. There's a wonderful French map I saw recently of Australia. So, you know, we start to see, you know, with Cook jumping ahead a little bit, you know, with Cook's discovery of the east coast, we see, you know, the eastern part of the continent also mapped. And so we finally have the island continent fully understood. And then eventually, of course, the understanding of the Bass Strait between Tasmania and the mainland as well. So Australia takes form. There's a wonderful French map of earlier expeditions which, in that brief period of time when Napoleon took France into the metric system. And so it's actually a calculation of the area. It's actually pencil drawn onto the map. It's in a private collection here in Perth, and it measures the area of Australia in square meters and it dates to this period of time. And then, of course, they abandoned their metric experiments as a real reminder of kind of, I think, the pursuits, the intellectual pursuits of people like both the French and also Cook. I mean, they're imperial, clearly, and militaristic and vying against each other and interested in kind of, you know, the. The British were very keenly trying to ensure that they had the right locations to. To kind of roll out global, increasingly global imperial agendas. But equally, they're also fueled by science. And so with Cook, we have, you know, the presence of a. The boat is absolutely heaving with natural scientists, particularly obviously, Joseph Banks, who's there with his team, you know, collecting plants and animals. The French are equally desperately collecting plants and animals. And, you know, it's just a fascinating and very familiar world that's beginning to unfold through their journals.
- [40:16]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
What does that mean, then, for the first encounters between the British and the Aboriginal peoples?
- [40:24]
Professor Alistair Patterson
Or they carry both of those things. They carry an interest and a curiosity from the British perspective of these people. But equally it also reflects the arrival of the Enlightenment. So both sides of the Enlightenment really, which is both curious but equally in the case of the British imperial and colonizing and the simplest kind of two faced coin nature of that is the idea that this kind of legal convenience that the British were to deploy in Australia and elsewhere of terra nullius, the idea that, you know, the people that they met and observed didn't actually have claim to the land that they clearly were living on. So you know, there's an immediate tension that is always there between the arrival of the British. It's less clear obviously with explorers, but of course when it comes to colonization it becomes much clearer. So cooks encounters are often very, very different to what would follow later on, particularly at Cooktown, you know, where he, the top of the Great Barrier Reef. They come ashore there and they're, you know, have very friendly engagements with Aboriginal people in the Cooktown area as they repair their vessel before, before heading off again. So but that changes obviously after 1788.
- [41:41]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So tell us about 1788.
- [41:44]
Professor Alistair Patterson
1788 is the arrival of the first British settlements. So what would have decades ago been called settlement and colonization and today is commemorated as a form of invasion. So you know, the wonderful tension today is, you know, Invasion Day is the counter name for Australia Day. So the reality is that we've come to understand these histories differently over the generation. So 1788 is the arrival of the British establishing themselves and what now is Sydney first from Botany Bay and then inside the Sydney Harbour at the tank stream right there next to where the Opera house is today.
- [42:24]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
How quickly did resistance against these invading colonisers begin?
- [42:31]
Professor Alistair Patterson
It was not immediate. In Sydney Harbour there's wonderful depictions and accounts, you know, of kind of Aboriginal women in small boats fishing and ignoring they didn't exist, British vessels as they're making their way through the harbour and kind of starting to map it out as well. So in many ways it's, you know, an extraordinary moment in cosmology for Aboriginal people. They had to deal with who were these people, the nature of these ships. There was lots of attempts to kind of enfold the British into kind of their understandings of cosmology of the dead. In lots of places in Australia it was felt that these were ancestors, at least initially, until it became clear that, you know, that there were these frictions around resources, people obviously as well, the tensions that existed between Aboriginal people and British sailors, particularly men and women. And so as that became clearer then the kind of the realities, I guess of British arrival became clearer and certainly led to violence between people. So initial attempts at understanding followed eventually by misunderstanding and then forms of sustained violence.
- [43:42]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And you're speaking to me as a white Tasmanian. When we get to Tasmania in the early 19th century, we see what could in its most sanitized form be called a prolonged conflict between European colonizers and Aboriginal people. But I've just finished reading Richard Flanagan's wonderful question seven, and he's much more unsparing in his terminology. I think he'd probably call it a sustained massacre. I don't put words in his mouth. But can you tell us how that evolved and the impact that the establishment of a British settlement had on the Aboriginal population?
- [44:25]
Professor Alistair Patterson
Absolutely. Tasmania was basically established very soon after Sydney as one of the places where they could continue to deal with the primary agenda of colonization. And that was, you know, exporting criminals to Australia as part of a kind of a colonizing enterprise in its own right. And Sydney quickly needed to expand. And it did so at Can Island, Norfolk island, then Tasmania was basically set up as an opportunity to actually be a harsher form of prison. And so after 1803 and 1804, the establishment at Risdon Cove and also in northern Tasmania on the Tamar river led to a tiny British presence that quickly grew. And Tasmania had great opportunities also for a farming class to develop. So alongside Port Arthur and Macquarie Harbour and these horrific prisons, Maria island and other places and factories that were used to kind of make prisoners useful, there was also, you know, an increasing number of settlers. And so the conflict that occurred between Palawa people. So Tasmanian Aboriginal people island wide are referred to as Palawa people. So there were seven distinct Aboriginal groups in Tasmania. So the Palawa basically began to resist the British pretty well from. From the start. There was an. There was actually a moment in 1883 at Risdon Cove, the British were basically had to abandon Risdon Cove initially and come back the following year because of conflict that occurred there. And that conflict really only grew through the 1820s and 30s, and by the 30s and 40s, it had become basically a war. And it's interesting that it's taken us so long to be comfortable with the idea of a frontier war. Because of course, all around the. You look at North America, people fully see these things in terms of kind of really forms of war. Equally, of course, in New Zealand, the wars there, which of course led to the treaty. But in Tasmania, there's a different kind of casting of that history. And so, you know, Richard's work is really Just the most recent example of a series of really important historical work that's occurred over recent decades. Lyndall Ryan, in particular, Cassandra Quybas and others, who have really revealed the nature of the frontier wars that occurred in Tasmania.
- [46:51]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So a couple of questions for you as we come to an end then, which is, as an archaeologist, can you tell me how our understanding of the history of interactions between Aboriginal people and Europeans is being expanded by archaeological discoveries? And what more might there be to learn about this other gray areas about which we still know little?
- [47:17]
Professor Alistair Patterson
It's a fascinating time as we come to realize this particular history, which, you know, I think that archeology plays a role in revealing the realities of the colonial world. And so whether that's missions, whether that's places where conflict occurred, there's a wonderful map which actually shows the massacres that occurred around Australia that's actually come out of some of this work initially in Tasmania. And, you know, that's only one aspect of the colonial world. There were deeper outside of conflict. There was also, you know, the ways in which there was forms of accommodation. Aboriginal people really were such a significant part of all the industries that made Australia. So, you know, the idea that Australia was riding on the sheep's back, you know, that it was an economy that was driven by wool. And yet when we look at pastoral and also cattle stations across Australia, they were established on country, you know, Aboriginal people's knowledge led people to the waters in many cases. And they were often, you know, the workforce. You know, elsewhere in the British Empire, we would talk about indentured labor. And in Australia, it's not that December, there's basically a local workforce that became bound to all these colonial industries through, you know, pieces of legislation like the Master and Servant Act. So there's some really fascinating legal tools and colonial tools that that were used in Australia to basically benefit from Aboriginal people. So one answer to that question is that nearly many of the sites that we think of as colonial sites, you know, homesteads and pastoral properties and hurling stations and ports, are actually Aboriginal sites. They're actually places where Aboriginal people made a significant contribution to, you know, the colonial world and then into the 20th century after Federation. So there is also a part of archaeology beyond that, and that's the places where Aboriginal people began to actually identify with this world. And the best example of that is through rock art. Australia has, you know, truly wonderful painted and engraved rock art, and we're working in a lot of those places. Some of the rock art that was produced in the early contact period when people first came in contact with Makassens and Asians. But also increasingly Europeans reveal their interpretation of these times and places. So you have these wonderful engraving sites overlooking pastoral stations where you have people riding horses and there's boots floating around because, you know, people value boots and guns and pipes and all of these other material trappings of that world that were part of their work. And so you can. And women in these long dresses, you know, in kind of desert heat. And so there are also kind of ways in which archeology provides an indigenous kind of an aboriginal perspective and memory of these things directly just through the material record. So I think it's, you know, it's a really exciting time to be using archaeology and history together to explore, you know, a very complicated world that is at the heart of national interests in truth telling and reconciliation, which is kind of, you know, part of the big Australian project.
- [50:36]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Professor Patterson, this has been absolutely fascinating. Thank you so much for introducing us to this history and to the work that's ongoing and just giving us a sense of the excitement of discovery at the moment and how this field is growing. Thank you so much for your time.
- [50:56]
Professor Alistair Patterson
Thank you.
- [50:58]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Thanks for listening to Not Just the Tudors and to my researcher Alice Smith and my producer Rob Weinberg. And do join me, Professor Susannah Lipscomb next time for another episode of Not Just the Tudors From History Hit.
- [51:23]
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- [52:14]
Professor Alistair Patterson
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Professor Alistair Patterson
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Professor Alistair Patterson
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