Cruise Through History - Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands

Terra Australis 1597 credit Gutenberg Australia

Second century maps of Greeks and Romans, such as Ptolemy in 150 CE, included a Great Southern Continent no one had ever seen. It seemed logical to the ancients that such a land mass must exist. Marco Polo, more than a millennium later, promised there was a continent of gold below Java. Of course, he wrote from jail, through an interpreter, of a land he had never seen.

Early masters of the seas of the Far East were Dutch. The seventeenth century Dutch East India Company (DEIC) was a world leader in corporate, shareholder endeavors. Their purpose in exploration was for stockholder profit, not scientific research, religious missionary outpost sites, or colonization. Dutch captains saw no profit lurking in arid northern Australia. They lingered no further south than Java, where plantations filled their ships with profitable commodities.

James Cook sailed to New Zealand in search of the Great Southern Continent for England in the latter half of the eighteenth century. His secret sailing instructions told him there must be such a place between Cape Horn and New Holland in the southern Pacific Ocean. When he sailed around New Zealand, he proved that it was an island and not the tip of the sought-after new continent. Years later, when Cook sailed from Botany Bay, now Sydney Harbor, up the east coast of Australia, he considered himself a failure for not turning east from New Zealand to search the open sea.

Cook was a keen observer and a diligent note taker. He was not an anthropologist. Along the coast of Australia, he observed hunter-gatherer people, of a lifestyle basic beyond his prior experience. He observed no Maori style forts, farms, or settlements. In Cook’s European sensibility, this was Terra Nullius, the land of no one. When he claimed the east coast of Australia for the crown of England, he had no idea of the vast real estate beyond, or that it would take two hundred years to sort out land claims, due to his mistaken assumptions.

This is the short story of discovery and conquest of a continent. Australia was not terra nullius. Those who agonize over Cook’s mistake, might consider the consequences for Aboriginal land rights resolved today, if Cook had attempted, or asserted a treaty which extinguished Aboriginal land rights. In this look at history as we find it, the story ends with land rights defined by court decree. Against a history of disease, violence and anger, all Australians can find solace in the law.

Dutch Masters of the Eastern Oceans

Portuguese are due credit for being the first among Europeans in an Age of Discovery to reach Australia. In 1516, a Portuguese fort was built on Timor. Finding no gold, or trading ports, they sailed away.

Spanish explorer Luis Vaes de Torres arrived in a strait between New Guinea and the upward reaching peninsula of north eastern Australia, now known as York Peninsula, in 1606. He captured twenty hostages, which he considered candidates to become interpreters and guides to the interior. He sailed to Manila with his human cargo, leaving behind his name. Torres Strait Islanders have no fond memories of their namesake.

Also, in 1606, Dutchman Willem Jansz sailed to the Spice Islands, looking for New Guinea. He veered south in error and landed on Cape York, at the top of the Australian York peninsula. He was greeted by spear throwing locals. The Dutch were undeterred.

With a solid base of operations in Java, the DEIC sent several more ships south to the north coast of Australia, which was recorded on maps as Arnhem Land. Between Arnhem Land and York Peninsula is the Gulf of Carpentaria. Dutch navigators mapped the area between Java, known then as Dutch Batavia, and the western side of the York Peninsula in the gulf, up through the 1640s.

The Dutch became familiar with Aboriginal Australians they regarded as most wretched creatures. When the DEIC enslaved locals in Java to work sugar plantations, the Dutch saw no potential either in farmland, or potential slaves in the northern territory. Another Dutchman, Maarten van Delft, made contact in 1705, with Tiwi people on the tiny island north of Darwin today. Though people were friendly, unless and until Dutchmen tried to take non-volunteer interpreter trainees, the Dutch saw no economic potential in the Southern Continent.

A century later, Mathew Flinders had contact with Aboriginals in the same area, and saw their life little changed. Yolngu people of Arnhem Land adopted some gardening practices of their northern neighbors, the Macassans, who came to their land to collect sea cucumber. Macassans collected great amounts of the sea urchins, to trade in China. Since Yolngu did not regard the catch as food, they had no issue with the roaming, short-term visitors, who left them alone.

Tasman Map (credit Gutenberg Australia)

The great Dutch explorer of the era in Australia was Abel Tasman¹, who sailed for the DEIC in 1642 and 1644. In his 1642 voyage to the Spice Islands, Tasman went from the Cape of Good Hope to Mauritius, known as a preferred stop in the Indian Ocean. Instead of heading northeast, Tasman sailed due east and discovered the island south of the Australian continent, which he named Van Dieman’s Land. Several centuries later, in an attempt to remove the stain of involvement in the Transportation Era, the island name was changed to Tasmania, in honor of the Dutchman.

From Van Dieman’s Land, Tasman continued east to New Zealand. He sailed up the west side of the North Island and then northeast to Tonga. There Tasman turned northwest to New Guinea and the Spice Islands, known as Moluccas. Tasman made a further voyage in 1644, where he mapped Australia, from the east side of the York Peninsula, along the northern coast, to the point he turned south. The west coast of Australia was previously known to Dutch sailors, notably as a place they were blown in unfavorable winds. Tasman had an idea of the enormity of the southern continent. He found nothing to recommend it.

The Dutch were great keepers of secrets about their travels. Tasman’s journal was not published until 1898. Tasman spent his final years as a manager of operations for the DEIC in Java.

Britain Claims the Continent

Dampier Peninsula, Australia (photo credit Creative Commons.org)

The first British landing in Australia of note was the pirate William Dampier. Journals of his travels are fabulous tales of adventure. Some of which are true. In a circumnavigation of the globe in search of treasure in 1688, Dampier spent time along the west coast of Australia, repairing his ship. His records of Aboriginals, flora, and fauna sparked the interest of King William III. Dampier’s 1697 book, A New Voyage Round the World was a best seller in his time.

In 1699, Dampier had a royal commission to explore the west coast of Australia. Before he could reach the Australian coast, his ship was in such a perilous condition, that he beached on the shore. The great adventurer ended up rescued by a merchant ship and returned to England in 1701. His next book, A Voyage to New Holland in 1703, gave him the aura of a shipwreck survivor.

Plants Found in New Holland by William Dampier (credit Gutenberg Australia)

Dampier was removed from the Royal Navy for cruelty to crew. His circumnavigation adventurers were as a pirate. In his later voyage in the South Pacific, to capture treasure of Manila Galleons headed to Acapulco, Dampier gained notoriety as the captain who left Alexander Selkirk marooned on Juan Fernandez Islands. Selkirk complained about seaworthiness of the ship. Selkirk was right. The ship sank. Selkirk was rescued by another English adventurer, Woods Rogers, which is another story.²

Captain James Cook came to the South Pacific to observe the transit of Venus, a marker in measuring earth’s distance from the sun. Then he went looking for the Great Southern Continent. He proved that New Zealand was an island, not the tip of a continent. Turning west, Cook discovered Botany Bay, so called for the collection of plants accomplished by his botanists.

James Cook (credit Gutenberg Australia)

In the rubric of Cook’s day, when making contacts with advanced cultures, trade treaties were in order. If the location held hostile inhabitants, it was avoided unless strategic. If of value in commerce, Britain landed the military. If the land appeared uninhabited, it was considered terra nullius, the land of no one. Cook knew of New Holland, the land beyond the southern sea. If the east coast of an uncharted land mass was not New Holland, then it was claimable for England.

Cook claimed the east coast of Australia as New South Wales. He recorded seeing few people with spears and no farms, homes, or canoes. He saw no one with whom he could make a treaty. No chieftain asserted himself. Cook saw the land in what he reported as a pure state of nature.³

Conquest of Land in an Age of Terra Nullius

In the late nineteenth century, England was desperate to find a new location for exile of convicts. The American colonies were in revolt, curbing the availability of New England as a venue. Prison ships in the Thames were overloaded denizens of disease. Worse yet, the ships put incarceration within view of Londoners. When Cook submitted his report, it was timely and useful information.

In 1788, English settlers came to the Sydney Basin. The first to arrive were opportunist officers of the New South Wales Company, determined to control land and commerce. Poor farmers, with barely the means to pay for passage, looked to Australia as a place to become prosperous land owners, without the stigma of social class that limited social and economic mobility in England. In this new place, possibilities were limitless, or so new arrivals thought.

Aboriginal Australians looked at new arrivals with interest. As long as they were few in number, Aboriginals retreated from the coast. As long as no chief asserted land ownership, where land could be bargained for in sale, as in New Zealand, settlers established farms and ranches.

As the number of settlers increased, and farms became more numerous, new arrivals were in competition for Aboriginal food supply. Europeans were efficient at shooting game and trapping fish. Farms displaced areas of traditional seed collection. Aboriginal people were amiable in dealing with newcomers until their survival was threatened. They saw the survival line crossed before Europeans realized the impact of their actions.

Many Australians consider January 26, 1788, Australia National Day. For Aboriginal Australians, the day is a mark of pain. In that year, not only did British arrive to settle and establish farms, French military ships arrived. French confrontation with Aboriginals was hostile and left natives apprehensive when dealing with foreigners.⁴ Then, British convict ships arrived. Convicts stole from Aboriginals. There was an incident in which convicts were speared and Aboriginals died.

In 1789, another small pox epidemic spread through Australia. Whether brought by Europeans or Macassans, the result was death of half the population of Eora people. Eora are a reference to the population of Aboriginal peoples of eastern Australia. Depletion numbers were catastrophic. Deaths from disease exacerbated the decline in Aboriginal births, the result of years of Aboriginal women contracting venereal disease from random sailors of various nations.

When Aboriginals stole food from settlers, the response was armed settlers hunting and shooting peaceful camps of Aboriginal women and children. Aboriginal warriors retaliated by driving settler sheep or cattle over a cliff. Freed British convicts were given open land to settle further into the interior. Aboriginals responded by burning farms. Clearly the land was not terra nullius.

From Terra Nullius to Aboriginal Australian Land Rights

1814 Thomson Map of Australia, New Zealand and New Guinea

As the nineteenth century began, Europeans looked at natives with a paternalistic view. Missionaries came to Australia to distribute food, education and Christianity to Aboriginals. Governor Lachlan Macquarie in Sydney began a school for Aboriginal children. Mixed raced children, though not abandoned by Aboriginal family groups, were collected by British agents and brought to boarding schools. The children were taught to become British citizens in what is termed the Stolen Generation. Some children prospered and others did not.

While hostilities escalated in the first decades of the nineteenth century, Britain continued to encourage settlers to occupy empty territory. In Melbourne, a Native Police Force was begun, in which Aboriginals with tracking skills were given horses and guns. They tracked groups of Aboriginals retaliating the conquest of their land by burning settler farms. Violence increased.

The number of Aboriginal deaths due to violence during this period is subject to debate today. Looking across sources, there is some agreement that twice as many Aboriginals died due to violence than did settlers. The number of deaths from disease was likely four times the number.

Britain considered setting aside land reserved for Aboriginals. Unable to find Aboriginal leaders to negotiate a treaty, picture signs were created and posted as warnings for consequences of raids. The British failed to understand Aboriginal social organization, even after decades of interaction.

The British failed to appreciate that consolidating disparate Aboriginal peoples onto a single land area required one group to trespass on gathering lands of another. Aboriginals did not want to be forced into war with other Aboriginals. They appreciated scarcity of food sources and consequences for encroachment on territory of others. If settlers realized prior land use by Aboriginals, they ignored indications of prior ownership, not recognized by their government.

The century from 1820 to 1920, was a period of settler expansion, Aboriginal response and devastating Aboriginal population decline due to disease. To visualize the extent of settler impact on the land, draw a line from Adelaide northeast to Brisbane on a map. The area from the line to the coast, once land of Aboriginal peoples, was controlled by settlers. The area above the line includes desert, hardly able to support a healthy population of hunter-gatherers. Draw an arc coast to coast above Perth to Broome, to visualize settlement of Europeans on the western habitable coast. Arid red desert lies between coasts. This land was left to Aboriginal occupants.

Add to the mix, increased technology of guns to the six-shot revolver. Settlers had the most recent technology in guns. Aboriginals, rapidly becoming dependent upon European food, also mastered European weapons. Some Aboriginals had older guns and little ammunition.

Aboriginal Protection Societies proliferated from the 1840s, supported by church groups given land by the government. Societies fed and educated Aboriginals in locations remote to cities. Missionaries gave from the heart, based on a European vision of humanity. Charles Darwin visited Australia in 1836, and proclaimed Aboriginals to be a doomed race. Social Darwinism, the idea of stronger races prevail, was popular in Europe until the later twentieth century.

In the 1930s, government response to crisis in Australia was a policy of assimilation. Through education, Aboriginal people could adopt British knowledge. The assumption was that British knowledge would enable Aboriginals to become more accepting of British lifeways. British lifeways included strata of social class, in which people of color were at the lowest rung.

The 1960s was a decade of social movements and demonstrations across the globe on issues of human rights. In Australia, the government policy shifted to ending assimilation and preserving culture. The question faced by the Australian government was how to preserve Aboriginal culture in remote areas, where there were few social services, and most acute despair.

When the government required equal pay and provision for housing for families of ranch hands, few ranchers could afford to retain Aboriginal workers. Unemployment among Aboriginals increased. Substance abuse increased. Dependency upon government support increased. People who functioned as hunter-gatherers for thousands of years, became government dependents within a century. Most poitent, government decided for Aboriginals what was in their best interests. Government evolved from conqueror, to paternal assistance, to caretaker of Aboriginals.

Aboriginal Land Rights March in Melbourne 1968 (Photo credit News Ltd/Newspix)

The 1970s began an era of land rights determination. Gurindji people claimed aboriginal title to traditional lands from among Crown Land. There were no treaties to extinguish their claim. The Gurindji were awarded ten square miles of cattle station land in 1975. By 1991, the land was deserted. The experiment seemed a failure. Failure in fact was considered progress in concept.

The 1981 Pitjantjatjara Land Rights Act acknowledged a corporate clan body of Aboriginal people, given forty square miles of land in South Australia. The corporation has control of rents and income from land, although it shares mining royalties with the government. The Act established a means to recognize an Aboriginal group, resolve land rights, and manage income and benefits to members, without requiring an identified tribal leader, a concept foreign to Aboriginal culture.

In 1992, the High Court of Australia considered the case of Eddie Mabo’s claim for land rights determination. The Mabo Case is historic. The court overturned the 1788 determination of Britain, that Australia was terra nullius. Cook’s Mistake became Cook’s Redemption. Due to Cook’s failure to acknowledge land ownership, there are no treaties to bar present-day claims to native title.

Aboriginal Land Rights (credit Wiki commons)

Native Title is defined in Australian law as indigenous inhabitants’ interests in land, whether communal, group, or individual, under traditional law and custom of the group. In Wik Peoples v. Queensland, in 1996, the court clarified the Mabo case to hold that Native Title is not extinguished by government granted leases to land. Court law was made into parliamentary law in the 1998 Native Title Amendment Act, which establishes a process to adjudicate land claims. The Indigenous Land Fund was established to provide for purchase of land and cover administrative costs.

Two hundred years of land management under an assumption of terra nullius could not be resolved in two decades. The process is a beginning. Deeply held prejudices do not melt with the passage of law. In 2008, Prime Minister of Australia, Kevin Rudd gave a formal apology for centuries of government policy toward Aboriginals. That too, is part of the process of healing.

Sixty-five thousand years ago, humans migrated into Australia looking for space upon which to thrive. In the interim, the world has become highly populated. Living in close space, amicably, was resolved by Aboriginal Australians for thousands of years prior to European discovery. Living together amicably today is still a quest.

Governor Lachlan Macquarie

Entrance to Sydney Harbor

The sail-in experience of the Sydney Harbor is the reason Australia cruise itineraries book to capacity as soon as they are offered. A cruise provides the best introduction to Sydney. Few harbors of the world offer such drama as a sail into sight of the Sydney Opera House on the point, with the high-rise buildings pushed back, and the green of the Royal Botanic Gardens framing the view. Cruise ships move under the bridge, within earshot of growls emanating from Taronga Zoo, on the opposite shore, and come to dock where the first settlers arrived. On shore is Captain William Bligh in bronze, one of the first governors of New South Wales, there to greet everyone.

Once on the Sydney dock, what next? Some visitors head to Bondi Beach, or one of the many lovely beaches along the shore outside the harbor to the south of the city. Some visitors are whisked onto big buses for a quick ride around, before returning to the harbor area to wander around the Sydney Opera House, for a close-up view at icon architecture in a perfect setting.

There is more to Sydney than the harbor. It may not be obvious at a first look. Beyond the harbor and the preserved area of The Rocks, that is the early immigrant section, with the warehouses and small flats for new arrivals, there is a palisade of incredibly tall and imposing commercial buildings, the product of economic success of recent decades. The Sydney most visitors would enjoy seeing is spread across both sides of the sprawling Royal Botanic Gardens, and several harbors from the Overseas Passenger Terminal in the center, to the east at Cowper Wharf, and to the west at the newly redeveloping Ultimo area, of former heavy industry around Darling Harbor.⁵

To comfortably venture beyond the harbor, it is helpful to understand the history of the city. Sydney grew by fiat, in clumps.⁶ It was founded as a depot to support Transportation Era prison camps. Early governor Lachlan Macquarie, who thought he might create a city in the first decades of the nineteenth century, was admonished for his efforts and recalled to London. He was followed by Governor Ralph Darling, who paved streets and royally cashed in on housing subdivisions, although he was adamant that Sydney should not have a theatre.⁷

There is greater depth to history in Sydney than can be encapsulated in a short story.⁸ Development, from supply depot, to a city of international stature, not often seen in a non-capital city, is told in six segments, through its buildings, representative of layers of city history. The story begins, where Sydney began, at The Rocks, then moves to efforts of Governor Macquarie to create a city. Next comes Sydney’s literal Golden Age, funded by gold mining, and built of golden Sydney sandstone. In the twentieth century, Sydney was impressed by architectural phases of the world as it went through Art Deco, in the industrial age, to modernism’s steel and glass, to finally settle on icon architecture, which requires this story to return to the harbor and the Opera House.

Sydney is still a young city, compared with cities of Europe. It is still under construction. For the cruise visitor, enthralled by the harbor, this story begs to create a deeper view of the port city.

The Rocks

The Rocks

Sydney began as a consequence of the Transportation Era. It was not a prison site. Captain James Cook extolled the possibilities of Botany Bay in 1770. Islands of the bay, outside the immediate Sydney Harbor, became the venue for notorious prisons of the Transportation Era. Those prisons have a separate story in this Itinerary.

Monument to Settlers at Sydney Rocks

Prisoner transportees were deposited in the area that would become Sydney in the late eighteenth century. These men and women were deemed non-dangerous. They were punished by the journey, then left to fend for themselves as farmers, in virgin turf, more forest and rock than farmland. The name The Rocks comes from available material, mixed with mud, used to build the first homes. So far from anything familiar, with Aboriginal occupants of the land not pleased to see intruders, the first settlers were like people deposited on another planet. This was home.

Little is left of the first arrivals in Sydney. Their homes melted around them in the rain. One of the earliest buildings preserved today is the John Cadman Cottage, first built in 1816. A modest structure now, amidst surrounding buildings, when built it would have seemed a palace. Cadman must have appreciated the cottage as his home from 1827 to 1845. He began life in Sydney as a transporté in 1798. He persevered to a pardon in 1821, and a position as a harbor official, which included the benefit of this home near the pier.

Cadman Cottage

All new arrivals to Sydney came through The Rocks. Modest apartments were built, which were small and densely arranged, on back streets. The Rocks was a place of lanes leading around warehouses. There were no wide streets or boulevards. Crammed between the water and the hill, upon which the Sydney Harbor Bridge pylons are now rooted, thousands of people lived. Their only dream was to leave The Rocks for wilderness farming. These were city people imaging a life as farmers; knowing nothing, possessing no skills for farming, and being provided few tools.

In 1900, the plague broke out in Sydney. It began in The Rocks. People were dispersed to other marginal housing. Buildings were torn down. New brick warehouses and shops were built. The Rawson Institute for Seaman, close to Cadman Cottage, was built in 1909. This home for old sailors replaced the Sailors’ Church built in 1859, on the same site. Commercial buildings of early twentieth century red brick, and sandstone of the Victorian era, line roads of The Rocks today.

Construction of the Sydney Harbor Bridge in 1932, required removal of early-built remnants of The Rocks. Local rocks, which were used to build a retaining wall for the approach to the bridge, form a severe backdrop to preserved early twentieth century flats. Tented markets fill the streets under the bridge today. This fun place to shop for visitors, approximates what life was like two centuries earlier, when tented markets were the mainstay of shopping in Sydney.

Harbor to Harbor View under Sydney Bridge

Territorial Era

Sydney Mint of Lachlan Macquarie

Sydney transitioned from a random settlement at The Rocks, to a formative city of stature, during the administration of Governor Lachlan Macquarie. His achievements are considerable in light of tumultuous circumstances in which he governed. He was appointed in 1809, to quell the Rum Rebellion, which had been the undoing of his predecessor, Captain William Bligh. He was recalled in 1821, under similar circumstance as faced Bligh, when powerful locals felt their controlling grip on the city was slipping.⁹

Captain Bligh was a naval officer sent to New South Wales to contend with self-empowered officers of the New South Wales Company, a company more mercantile than military. Major General Macquarie landed in Sydney with his own loyal company of army stalwarts. He quashed remnants of self-appointed tyrants in a land that required, as he saw it, military rule. He became the last of the military governors. His legacy was to create a welcome place for civilian rule.

Macquarie established a mint for the first official local currency, using Spanish coins with the center punched; transitioned cricket grounds to the signature city park, Hyde Park, in 1810; and began the first bank of New South Wales. He named the continent Australia in 1817, in honor of the choice of names given by Mathew Flinders, the first to circumnavigate the continent in 1804.

Like Bligh, Macquarie ran into problems when his actions compromised control of freemen in the province. The issue became freemen versus freedmen. Macquarie’s tenure oversaw the development of a court system, transitioning from military to civilian justice. Macquarie preferred a more egalitarian form of justice, involving freedmen. Large landowners in New South Wales preferred to replicate social exclusions of the British rule of law. Large landowners prevailed.

As governor, Macquarie could grant pardons and issue travel authorization to convicts. There was a practice in New South Wales, enjoyed by large landowners, of not granting a pardon, or travel authorization at the expiration of a sentence served. Macquarie’s practice of granting pardons increased the number of freedmen, at the expense of freemen’s access to unpaid labor. By the time Macquarie was recalled to London, there was a population in Sydney exceeding 36,000, of which freedmen exceeded the number of freemen. Officially, Macquarie