Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Early Contact
The Chinese eunuch Admiral Cheng Ho (Zheng He) may have been the first non-Abori-
ginal visitor to northern Australia. He reached Timor in the 15th century, and some sug-
gest he also made it to Australia. In 1879, a small, carved figure of the Chinese god Shao
Lao was found lodged in the roots of a banyan tree in Darwin. That's the clincher, the
pro-Zheng camp says: the carving apparently dates from the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644).
There's evidence to suggest that the Portuguese were the first Europeans to sight Aus-
tralia's northern coast, sometime during the 16th century, followed promptly by the
Dutch. Famed Dutch navigator Abel Tasman charted the north coast, from Cape York to
the Kimberley in Western Australia, in 1664.
Other 17th-century visitors to the north were Macassan traders from the island of
Celebes (today's Sulawesi in Indonesia), who set up seasonal camps to gather
trepang
(sea cucumber). Interracial relationships were common, with some local Aboriginal
people journeying to Celebes to live.
Down south, the Dutch ship
Gulden Zeepaard
made the first European sighting of the
SA coast in 1627. The French ships
Recherche
and
L'Esperance
followed in 1792, while
the first British explorer on the scene was Lieutenant James Grant in 1800. In 1802 Eng-
lishman Matthew Flinders charted Fowlers Bay, Spencer and St Vincent Gulfs and
Kangaroo Island on his ship the
Investigator
.
Europeans Move In
In 1829 Captain Charles Sturt headed inland from Sydney and fell into the Murray River,
floating downstream to Lake Alexandrina (in today's SA). His glowing reports inspired
the National Colonisation Society to propose a utopian, self-supporting South Australian
colony founded on planned immigration with land sales, rather than convict-based
grants. The British Parliament then passed the
South Australian Colonisation Act
in
1834, making SA the only Australian colony established entirely by free colonists (a dis-
tinction most South Australians happily highlight).
The first official settlement was established in 1836 at Kingscote on Kangaroo Island,
before colonial surveyor-general Colonel William Light chose Adelaide as the site for the
capital. The first governor, Captain John Hindmarsh, landed at present-day Glenelg on 28
December 1836, and proclaimed the Province of South Australia.
In the NT, early European attempts at settlement - on Melville Island in 1824, Raffles
Bay in 1829 and the Cobourg Peninsula in 1838 - all failed in the face of indigenous res-
istance, disease and climate, until the settlement of Palmerston (renamed Darwin in
1911) was established in 1869.
