The Rest Is History - 121. Australia Before Cook

Episode Date: November 18, 2021

"Discovered this territory, 1770". So reads the inscription on a statue of Captain Cook in Hyde Park, Sydney. But did he really discover it? Tom and Dominic are joined by David Hunt to explore the long story of human settlement in Australia, and of the European explorers who reached it before Captain Cook ever sighted Botany Bay. (Also features giant wombats) *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. G'day, welcome to The Rest Is History. The history of Australia is littered with marvels and wonders. From the sporting high points of the 1981 Ashes and the 2003 Rugby Union World Cup Final, to high culture, the career of Paul Hogan or the music of Midnight Oil. But Tom, if we were picking one point where Australian history really started, could you do better than the statue in Hyde Park, Sydney,

of Captain Cook that bears the inscription, Discovered this Territory, 1770? What do you think of that? I think you've just given the most pommy introduction to Australian history imaginable. And if there are any Australian listeners left after that introduction, they'll be running for the outback. Yes, well, we do have quite a lot of Australian listeners. And we've had quite a lot of Australian listeners saying, are we going to do something on the history of Australia? They surely would have known we'd start with an introduction like that.

I'm sure they did. I'm sure that's what they wanted. And I said, well, who should we get on? And the universal consensus of Australia was that we should get on our guest today, who is David Hunt, who has written three histories of Australia, all of them with the name, the word Girt in, as in Girt with you know a motor whatever so girt the unauthorized history of australia true girt and girt nation he's also a broadcaster who's made a film for history channel called aussie inventions that changed the world and he's a podcaster award winning uh podcaster uh of rum rebels and rat bags which i think david the the logo of that is is that captain cook it is it's it's it's captain cook wearing a silly british hat which is no such thing there's no such thing david i don't know what you're talking about british hats are always sensible i'm very

disappointed that you did not mention the t20 2021 victory the other day as part of the great australian sporting history. I've no idea what you're talking about. Everyone knows that 2020 is a ludicrous format and the test is the ashes that matter. So, David. Yeah, yes. Captain Cook, great hero in Australia, but until recently when it's slightly changed, hasn't it? Well, look, when I went to school, and I'm going to date myself here,

I remember Dennis Lilley playing vaguely as a young fellow, so I've just hit 50. When I went to school in the 1970s and 1980s, we were effectively taught as students that Captain Cook discovered Australia. And that was the conventional wisdom, and the school curricula had a very British view of Australian history. Recently, the Australian history curriculum has been far more complex and far more nuanced,

and there is an upwelling of criticism about statues of our colonial figures. We have to import debates from other countries before we actually have them here. So we have to see Americans and Brits getting angry about statues before we do the same thing. But the statue of Captain Cook in Hyde Park has discovered this territory 1770, which is regarded as an insult to the indigenous people who discovered this territory some 65,000 years ago, give or take a few millennia, and all of the various other people who landed on these fair shores pre-Cook, who wasn't even Captain Cook at the time. He was a lieutenant. The British perspective, I mean, we were always taught, if we were taught about Australia at all,

if it was a sort of, you know, of page about Australia in a kind of world history textbook, it always was, you know, Captain Cook discovered... There was a Lady Bird book, wasn't there? There was a Lady Bird book of Captain Cook. There was a Lady Bird, but that was exactly what I was going to say. So that's the measure of fame in English history. Captain Cook is one of the sort of great canonical... You can try and discover Australia. Right, exactly. That's exactly it.

And so Captain Cook is, you know, just give us a little portrait of him. Because he's not a kind of terrible guy, is he? Like a conquistador or something? I mean, he's a kind of admirable figure. He's a kind of great navigator. Undisputedly a great navigator.

I mean, when he was picked for the Endeavour expedition to Australia, he was actually a fairly lowly warrant officer who'd served over in the Seven Years' War, posted to Canada, killed a few Frenchmen, which was regarded as good sport, but was noted for his cartography and also noted for writing a learned paper on the sun and navigation. Because he was basically self-taught, wasn't he? I mean, he was from very humble stock. He was kind of father was a farm labourer. Yeah, he was a grocer's apprentice and took to sailing fairly late in life, serving on the free lover sort of bohemian coal-carrying vessel that plied the channel and finds himself over in Canada.

But look, undisputably a great navigator. But he was chosen for the Endeavour voyage because the primary purpose of it was to measure the transit of Venus across the sun in 1869. Sorry, 1769 in Tahiti. And so because he was a good cartographer, because he was an experienced amateur astronomer, the Royal Society promotes him effectively, or the Admiralty promotes him from warrant officer to lieutenant and posts him off to the other side of the world to measure this astronomical phenomena,

to help measure longitude more effectively. They thought that if we can make this precise calculation of how long it takes Venus to track across the face of the sun, we'll be able to use that to improve our navigation techniques. And so from there, he then gets secret orders, doesn't he? And he kind of opens up his letters and it tells him to go and discover Australia. He gets secret orders that he is to sail home via New Zealand, which he circumnavigates and effectively improves on the charting of the Dutch.

But also people are interested in searching for Terra Australis. This is the great mythical counterweight continent that was meant to, according to Greek philosophers, stop the globe from tipping off its axis. So Aristotle comes up with the brilliant idea once Pythagoras says, well, hey, the world's a globe. Aristotle says, well, we've got a lot of land up here where we are. There must be some down south. And so for much of the sort of 1400s, 1500s, 1600s, 1700s, there was a desire amongst some of the European powers to find this great southern land. And certainly after exploring New Zealand, he decides that he will sail home by the eastern coast of New Holland,

as Australia was known. So it was obvious that he didn't discover Australia because he says, I'm going to go there in my butt. And in 1770, and this is one of the great stories of Australian history. The Cook's Landing Place at Botany Bay honours him for landing there on the 28th of April 1770, even though he doesn't arrive there until the following afternoon. And this date has not been corrected on the official monument for 151 years. But, David, in Britain, we find Australian days really confusing. I can never remember whether you have a head or –

so that's obviously what it is. We'll put it down to British dating era. Yeah, exactly. But is it right that no European has landed at Bodney Bay, at least? Is that right? I mean, he's the first European to land there. Look, there's no evidence of any European exploration of the east coast of Australia before 1770. The French ran into the Great Barrier Reef a few years earlier and turned tail. in the Australian school history curricula that the Portuguese were bobbing off the coast of eastern Australia in the 1520s

and left behind a vast mahogany ship that is buried in the dunes near the sleepy town of Warrnambool. But that theory has largely been discredited and there's no real proof. Have they found the ship? Well – What's the ship? There is believed to be some sort of vessel there in the dunes. At one stage when the sand shifted, something that looked rather like a barge rather than

a 16th century Portuguese or 15th century 16th century Portuguese caravel made of mahogany. When you look at the stories that appeared in the newspapers, the guy who's often credited with discovering it was an Irishman known for their tall tales in Australia. The time where he claims to have actually discovered it, he appears to have been sitting in a peat hut somewhere in Ireland. So you automatically sort of discredit the accuracy of the story.

There were two bits, reported bits of the mahogany ship were collected by a bloke called Archibald, who was the editor of a leading Australian magazine, donated to the Australian National Library, and they've been later tested and found to be made of eucalyptus, a tree that was in a fairly short supply in Portugal in the 1500s. So let's sort of pull back a bit then. So Cook is supposed to have arrived at this date in Bosney Bay.

There's a statue of Cook, but obviously he's not the first human being to have arrived at this date in Bosney Bay. There's a statue of Cook. But obviously, he's not the first human being to have discovered Australia. So how long have human beings been in Australia before Captain Cook? Well, we've actually got a massive question here from Rachel Everett-Gouache. I hope I've pronounced that right. How did people get there? When did they get there? How long did it take to occupy such a vast area? So there are three massive questions.

The great thing about history is, of course, it's contestable. Prehistory, for want of a better term, is even more contestable. When I was a kid, we were taught that Aboriginal people had been on the continent for about 10,000 years. The date that is commonly accepted now is around 60,000 to 65,000 years. Some people push that back to 120,000 years, but there's a broad consensus of 65,000, give or take, a couple of millennia. So this is Homo sapiens coming out of Africa, crossing Asia, going down, across the islands. Of course, Aboriginal people, some Aboriginal people maintain

that they were created here and they've always been here, but the scientific evidence would support the out-of-Africa thesis that they effectively island-ped um from uh uh sunda as sort of southeast asia was known to sell the continental landmass of sahoo which which took in australia and new guinea sea levels were between 70 and 140 40 meters lower than they are now is that because all the water's locked up in ice is this this during the Ice Ages? Yeah, during one of the Ice Ages. So you could sort of walk around New Guinea, Australia,

Tasmania were part of one landmass. They were obviously a seafaring people because to get across the Sunda Strait and to get across the Wallace Line that separates Bali and Lombok, it's a deep ocean trench that the big scary animals of Asia had never been able to get across. So no tigers in Lombok. And so when the first Australians would have crossed that line, they would have suddenly found this sort of land where there were no large prey animals intent on eating them, but there were lots of animals that had never seen humans before

that basically sat there and you could club them over their head and have a jolly good meal. So that was probably the first experience of Australia around about 65,000 years ago. But in Australia then, I mean, there are extraordinary animals. So there is the marsupial lion. Yes, yes, yes. Supposedly kind of lurks in trees.

Fibrocolio carnifex. Yes. I went to Adelaide and saw a skeleton of it in the museum there, and it looked very menacing, and you wouldn't want to have it drop out on top of you from a tree. No, they got up to about 130 kilos. They're believed to be ambush predators. Their musculature suggests that they perhaps weren't great runners,

but they're effectively the size of a panther or a leopard that would leap out and take a nibble of you. Dennis, liliesque predator to have jumping on you. We've had lots of questions about this, haven't we? So the Kanzuk kid and others have asked about, I mean, all kinds of things, land crocodiles, giant koalas, giant kangaroos. Are these things real? Do they really exist? Yeah, so look, megafauna, as they're known, giant kangaroos. Are these things real? Do they really exist?

Yeah, so look, megafauna, as they're known, which is Latin for really big animal. Yeah, look, Australia had its own megafauna. The land crocodile, the quincana, is one of my favourites. It grows up to maybe seven metres in length. It's got – its legs are underneath it for walking on land rather than at its sides for paddling. And fossils have been found in areas near no known watercourses. So, you know, you British tourists are afraid of all sorts of animals

in Australia, particularly those in our waterways. This was actually one that you could be scared of on land as well. I didn't know the way you said you began that sentence with such contempt, you British tourists. Well, it's always the first question we're asked is about our animals. But drone koalas, look, there was a koala only about a third larger than our current koala. We in Australia have legends of the drop bear,

basically designed to frighten tourists of giant koalas that drop from the trees and savage you. No evidence of the drop bear. My favourite, there was, of course, the diprotodon, which was the largest. Yes, the giant wombat. Giant wombat. Well, yeah. It's sort of a rhinoceros-sized wombat-like creature.

And one of the things about Australia is that its land is incredibly arid, limited nutrients in plants, and lots of the large marsupials here, pouched animals, to conserve energy, their brain pan or their brain devolved. So you're saying they're thick. They were remarkably thick. The koala today, its brain has shriveled so that it effectively

gets concussion every time it turns its head. Oh, that's adorable. Because it's trying to save energy. But look, it's too whacked out on gum leaves to really notice. But the diprotodon, again, large skull, large sinuses, small brain. So old koalas would be gutted by the degeneracy of their descendants. Is that what you're saying? Well, that's right. We Australians have obviously evolved smaller brains in the last 200 years.

Just on Diprotodon, which is this enormous wombat. Wombats, famously, their poos are square. Did Diprotodon do kind of like, do we know? Did he do enormous square-shaped turds? There is actually a field of study from which you can date when the megafauna may have died out, which is looking at the fungus that could be found in the poos of herbivorous animals in Australia.

There's no suggestion that the diprotodon had a square arsehole. Oh, that's a shame. That's a shame. Look, I mean, my favourite example of the megafauna is known by archaeologists and naturalists affectionately as the demon duck of doom. Wow. So, Bullacus planae, which is basically a quarter-tonne, eight-foot-tall carnivorous kick-ass duck. So it probably had died out before the first Australian humans appeared.

Can I just ask specifically about humans arriving and the megafauna? Yeah. The megafauna is no longer around. Humans have arrived. Is there a link? Basically, are humans killing out out wiping out all these giant animals and it's interesting this is one of the sort of politically uh contested i can guess it is would be because because australian australian history because the idea is that that aboriginal australians

have cared for the land in a way that that's why europeans haven't so rather than rather than eating all the big animals and birds many of the forests. Yeah. Look, the jury remains out. There's no doubt that some of the megafauna co-existed with humans for a period of time. The length of time is contested. There appears to have been a significant megafaunal die-off about 40,000 to 44,000 years ago. Tim Flannery, who wrote a wonderful book called The Future Eaters, has the Blitzkrieg

theory of megafaunal extinction, which is essentially when humans arrived in Australia, there were all these big animals with small brains that sat there and let you put them on their head and said, eat me. And so, you know, people had really big barbecues for a very long time. And once the megafauna died out, there was a move to the hunting theory that aboriginal people fundamentally changed the australian landscape to to hunt for smaller food prey the alternative theory is that climate change played a significant impact um the the growing erudification of the continent as the result of the the the ice age is is there a sense in which this argument is driven by politics or would that be an overly reductive way of framing it?

No, look, it's a debate that moves backwards and forwards. And look, there were probably pockets of megafauna that survived until relatively recent times. There's the Bradshaw paintings or the Gweon Gweon paintings in Arnhem Land in the north of Australia, which are probably dated about 17,500 years ago. There's a couple of them that feature what appears to be a marsupial lion. Yeah, it kind of looks like Tigger, doesn't it, from Winnie the Pooh? It does. Or the tiger from Calvin and Hobbes.

Yes, that's right. A striped dog-like creature that could be a thylacine, the Tasmanian tiger, which the last ones died out in Australia in the 1930s down in Tasmania. Or did they? Or did they? Yes, yes. Oh, yes.

There's a whole episode in that yeah we must get down let's get back to the let's get back to the the aborigines so yeah you're talking you that all the theories about um uh what they did i mean those obviously rest on some sense of what their culture might have been so when we're talking about the first australians let's say let's say 50 000 40 000 years ago are we basinging that on specific archaeological evidence or are people extrapolating back from what they know of Aboriginal society in the 18th century or whenever? A number of different factors.

I mean, radiocarbon dating, sort of you can get 40,000, 50,000 years back before it stops being effective. Mungo Man is the sort of oldest body of an Aboriginal person that dates to about 40,000 BP. It's also the earliest example in the world that's known of ritual burial, where the body is buried with ochre paint sprinkled upon it. Right. You've got earlier dating of stone implements through sort of luminescent technology,

which can calculate how old something is by when it was sort of heated in a fire, as some early stone tools were. And you've got some genetic dating which suggests somewhere between 60 and 75,000 years ago as a timeline that sort of genetically fits. But beyond those things, can we say anything more sort of, I mean, obviously we know that there were people there, but can we say anything about the kind of society that they had

or their religion or their family structures or any of those kinds of things? Well, we certainly know in recent millennia what those things were like. I mean, you have over 250 languages, so you have a period of time for dispersal. You have most of Australia with one language group with different languages within that group and more completely different languages in the north, which may coincide with an infusion of Indian settlement several thousand years ago. And so, David, is it thought that the original wave of arrival of humans, say, 60,000 years ago, is that basically the group from which all the Aboriginal peoples in Australia descend, or are there waves of people coming? What's the thinking on that? Yeah, there's the single wave theory and the multi-wave theory.

And the single wave theory says that with the genetic diversity that you have in Australia, you would have had to have had about between 1,000 and 3,000 people come across about 65,000 years ago to have the genetic diversity that you have with the first Australians at the time of first contact. We know that the Lapita people, the sort of proto-Polynesian seafarers, probably stopped off and gave us the dingo sort of 4,000 years ago. There are suggestions of some Indian genetic admixture in the north of Australia again around that 5,000-year mark. So the multi-wave theory is that there were, if you can have one group of people coming over, why can't you have two, three, four, five or more? That is, there is some political and cultural arguments associated with that which suggests that people who are Aboriginal today were perhaps invaded by other people rather than having been there all the time and the first owners. So it's contested.

So there's a question here from the Burning Archive. It is sometimes said these days that Aboriginal culture is the oldest continuous culture in the world. Is this true? How could we know? How could we know is a very good question. Yeah. What you can say is that some of the Aboriginal Dreamtime stories suggest a continual culture and oral tradition that is many, many millennia old. There are stories of creatures that sound like megafauna in some of the Aboriginal Dreamtime stories. Is that the bunyip? Yeah, the bunyip, which is meant to be a grumpy creature that inhabits waterholes that we Australians call billabongs,

may trace its origins to the diprotodons that used to sort of wade in sort of marshland. There are also a range of stories of very large animals that gathered and gathered in the trees, perhaps which is where the giant koala theory comes from, that may trace back to a megafaunal-type creature. But also there are particular stories in very arid parts of Australia of a landscape that was radically different, much more fertile, and stories that really seem to be tracing back for people who've been in the same place for a while

to quite a different climate. Before we go, we have to have a break in a minute or two, but just before we do that, the Dreamtime stories, can you tell us a little bit about what they are and how we know about them and how we know that they are kind of authentic or continuous rather than, you know, so much folklore tends to be invented or sort of elaborated upon and, of course, changes over time. So, the Dreamtime stories, tell us a little bit more about them. Well, I mean, you have the Aboriginal people had an oral tradition. They didn't have writing. So you have an oral system of communication through the generations. You have songlines, which are effectively cultural songs that are passed on through the generations,

describing the landscape in some detail and particular geographical features that form a form of mnemonic device to navigate around your bit of the continent. But the idea of the Dreamtime, Aboriginal history is very different from a Western history where we focus on progress. Aboriginal cultures focused on continuity and stability. And the Dreamtime stories were, if you like, a way of codifying rules and laws.

They had supernatural elements. We know that modern Aboriginal people had sort of animist religious spiritual beliefs, that their ancestors inhabited rocks and trees of significance. And so you have this complex series of laws, cultural traditions, stories about who you can marry and who you can't marry. and it was beautifully summed up by an Australian anthropologist, Bill Stanner, who described the sort of dream time as timeless, described it as every when. So it's this fusing of spirituality with the past, present, and the future into sort of a series of stories as to how life is to be lived

and life is to be regulated. And when were they written down by non-Aboriginals? So were they recorded in the 19th century or how does that work? And look, this is one of the tricky bits. Often white explorers weren't terribly interested in sitting down and listening to Aboriginal stories. They were far more interested in chasing Aboriginal people off the land they were trying to put their sheep on. So certainly there are particularly Aboriginal creation myths.

They were collected because missionaries who were interested in spreading the word of God were trying to tap into what do you have there in terms of creation mythology. So you have many Aboriginal cultures have got a giant snake-like creator figure that is associated with water that Westerners name the Rainbow Serpent that appears throughout Australia. Down in Tasmania, the Tasmanian Aboriginal people of Bruny Island had a creator named Lala who appears to have been a giant ant. So there was some recording of these stories, but the best records you would have would be with Aboriginal people who wrote those stories down themselves in the late 19th and the early 20th century and to continue to tell those stories orally.

And just one last question before we go to a break. Do you think – did Aboriginal peoples in Australia have a sense of themselves as belonging to kind of the same group of people or do they have no sense of that at all? Is that a kind of a colonial imposition? So that's – look, the entire notion of Aboriginality is a colonial construct. I mean, Australia is, you know, the size of Western Europe plus some. It's like saying, you know, do the Poles and the Cornish regard each other as similar.

Yeah. You have over 250 language groups. Within those language groups, you have up to 50 clans, as low as just a handful of clans. So these people did not see each other as part of the same people. That being said, there was trade and communication across the continent. You have shells from northern Queensland appearing in western Australia where they were passed on as trade goods. So you have communication and trade occurring over large distances,

but there was certainly not the belief we are all Aboriginal people. All right. Well, I think we should go for a break now. And when we come back, perhaps we could look at the process by which Europeans and perhaps Chinese discovered Australia. Oh, good. I like that bit. We'll be back in a minute.

I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club.

If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes, and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Welcome back to The Rest Is History. We are talking about Australia, and in particular, we've been talking about Australia before the arrival of the first Europeans, or indeed the first British.

So, David, the first outsiders, as in non-Aboriginal peoples, to arrive in Australia. Now, in Britain, we were always brought up to think that this is Captain Cook, followed by boatloads of convicts but we've got a question from for example nova sleuth one of our listeners who asks about contact between indonesians and malayans or the people who lived in what are now indonesia and malaya um so are they arriving in Australia? And if so, why don't they settle it and colonize it? So there's evidence of the Makassans from the island of Sulawesi, which is modern-day Indonesia,

fishermen who the precise date is uncertain. It's certainly the early 1600s, probably in the 1500s, and they were coming to the northern shores of Australia to fish for trepang, sea cucumber, which was prized in China as an aphrodisiac. So that contact was, Australia was effectively an Asian sex shop as people are coming here to get this very ugly creature. It's basically a black sausage that sits in shallow coastal waters and aspires to nothing more than not ending up in a Beijing sex shop. And the Macassans –

What a life. That's it. The Macassans came here and they form close cultural relations with the Yongle people in Arnhem Land and actually effectively buy their labor for this industry. You have probably about a thousand Macassans coming here each season. They stay for months. They build these sort of demountable factories where they process the trepang, the sea cucumber. It's boiled, it's dried, it's buried in the sand for a few weeks,

it's dug up, it's boiled, it's packaged, and it's shipped off. And they traded glass, cloth, metal implements, alcohol, and there was language exchange as well. So when the first Europeans came to this part of Australia, when they appeared, the Aboriginal, the Yongle knew of them and they called them, ah, Belanda, which was Hollander that they'd picked up from the Macassan people. So they had an idea that there were Europeans out there. But yeah, that's the, other than the sort of Lapita

proto-Polynesians who arrived about 4,000 years ago and dropped off the dingo, they are the first really established contacts. Why don't people come in greater numbers? Why don't – given the population in Southeast Asia and so on and given that they are moving around in boats, they're seafaring peoples, why don't more people come to Australia? So, look, there is some Lapita DNA in some of the northern Torres Strait Islands and on the southern coast of New Guinea, predominantly Melanesian,

but some Polynesian influence as well. I think the answer is nobody really knows. There may have been, if you're coming in just a handful of boats and you encounter stiff resistance from some people who don't want you to stop there, as occurred in the Andaman Islands for centuries, if you run into some territorial people who drive you off, maybe you don't want to stay. But there certainly was trade with the dingo, and kangaroo fleas then appear to have got on dingoes

that the Lapita then took to Southeast Asia. So you get kangaroo fleas in some native gods. So Australia is exporting sex aphrodisiacs and fleas. And fleas. Pretty much. Well, you're really selling it. So, David, you mentioned China. Now, there is a theory, is there not, that the Chinese discovered Australia?

What do you make of that? If you're an Australian, it's a disturbing theory because in 2003, Premier Hu Jintao became, I think, just the second non-Australian to address both houses of parliament and basically said, look, we were here in the 1420s engaging in harmonious relations with the locals. Effectively, we were here first. China discovered the world, which basically said these vast treasure fleets had travelled all over the world as far south as Antarctica to the Americas. And two parts of that fleet up the east coast and west coast of Australia in the 1420s. And the idea is that there are these eunuch admirals. David, fans will be so pleased that you've got in some genital mutilation.

Well, I do have a section of my first book called Chinese Sellers with No Junk. And the suggestion has been roundly ridiculed. Menzies looks at Australian evidence from a chap called Rex Gilroy, who he cites as being some eminent Australian historian.

Rex actually wrote for a series of Australian magazines in the 1980s, stories like Why Yowie is a Fair Dinkum, the Yowie being the Australian equivalent of the Bigfoot, our own Nessie, about Stonehenge is here, and is the sort of guy who wrote stories about UFOs in magazines with topless women on the cover. This is presented by Menzies as a reliable primary source. That's on Holland.

And it's been labelled as junk history in various Australian exposés of the reliability of those Australian Chinese companies. So the Chinese didn't come to Australia, basically. There's no compelling evidence that the Chinese did come. They would have certainly known once the Macassans started delivering them dried trepang of the existence of the landmass to the south, but there's no evidence that they themselves came here, no.

Because they weren't particularly interested in anything that wasn't China. Well, look, the idea is that there is some evidence of these treasure fleets in the 1420s. Yeah, they went to Africa, didn't they, and brought back giraffes? Yeah, and India, but then there was a policy from the 1430s on of effectively isolation and closing themselves off from the world. So, yeah, no, it's highly speculative at best.

And, David, I'm just dredging this up from my memory, so I may have got this wrong. Wasn't there quite recently some Arab coins found on a beach that had come from Africa or something? Look, there are always, yeah, there have been some sort of shell-like coins. There are always bits of old coins and bits of old cannon found on Australian beaches.

Coins, Australia or New South Wales when it was formed was famous for having no currency, a deliberate decision to have no currency where rum becomes the liquid currency of choice. But what you have is you have sailors bringing coins from all over the world that may be, you know, pieces of eight. They what you have is you have sailors bringing coins from all over the world that may be, you know, pieces of eight. They may be quite old. They may have been bought out at some much later time. So, look, before 1606, there's no evidence of any sort of European contact. No compelling evidence of European contact. And then what happens in 1606?

Why is that such a key date? Look, there are two things that happened. The first is that the Dutch East Indies Company is formed in 1602, and they've muscled the Portuguese out of the Spice Islands, bits of Indonesia, to Australia's north. And so they are sending ships over to look for spices, send spices back to the Netherlands and around the world. And William Jan Soen, the captain of the Dufkin,

was sent south from the Spice Islands to look at whether there were new economic opportunities for trade, for collecting spice or other valuable trade goods. And he runs into the Cape York Peninsula in what is now northern Queensland and charts about 300 kilometres of it. He calls it Os Papua, thinks it's part of New Guinea. He names part of New Guinea, New Zealand, and sort of sails off in a state of geographical confusion. But you do have that Dutch contact in 16...

So when does Tasman turn up? Tasman turns up in 1642. He claims Van Diemen's land. He's a suck-up. He names it after his boss, Anthony Van Diemen, who's higher up in the Dutch East Indies Company. He goes and paddles around New Zealand and names New Zealand New Zealand, comes back and names the Australian landmass New Holland.

That's a great name. It's a great shame that it changed. The Dutch previously knew Australia as Beach before they called it New Holland. Beach. That's wonderful. Full of sand. Yeah. And when did they discover the quokka?

The quokka? Well, the quokka lives on Rottnest Island and would have been discovered fairly – just off the coast of Perth. For those of you who don't know the quokka, it is not megafauna. It is a small, cuddly, smiley kangaroo, much loved by tourists and much loved by starving Dutch sailors who stopped off at the island and ate it. So why don't the Dutch – so, okay, why isn't Australia Dutch? Okay, and also, Dominic, we've got a question here

from Eric Mercer. References to New Holland aside, was there any real possibility of the Dutch or indeed the French colonising Australia? Or was it always going to be England driven by its loss of the American colonies? Well, that's the question, isn't it? I mean, why on earth don't people,

if they've got their first, or indeed the Portuguese, they're in place, why on earth is, are they not all speaking, you know, Dutch or Portuguese in Australia? Well, look, I mean, as I say, the Portuguese theory of the sort of there in the 1520s on the East Coast is heavily contested. Those who insist that it is true, insist that as a result of the Treaty of Torsadilla, I think in 1494, where Spain and Portugal divide the world between themselves and the Pope says, you have this bit, you have that bit, that the Portuguese were in the wrong place

and so were shy about writing their discovery down, or that all the records burnt in a fire in a library in Lisbon. No evidence of this. The Spanish would have colonised Australia and 1606 is an important year because Louis Vas de Torres sails through the Torres Strait, the body of water that separates Australia from New Guinea,

and actually saw most probably the northernmost tip of Australia thinking it was another island in this sort of sea of treacherous shoals that he desperately wanted to get out of. He didn't stop. But if he had, the Spanish would have taken an interest because they were into colonizing. They were interested in spreading Christianity. They were interested in finding Terra Australis incognita. And it's lucky for the Brits that they kept on sailing.

The Dutch were a mercantile people. And if there was nothing, the East Indies Company was a mercantile company. It was sort of a projection of Dutch power, but it operated independently of the government. And it was only interested in setting up trading posts where there was something to buy or sell. And they decided that the bits of Australia that they stopped off at had called Dirk Hartog, who nails a pewter plate to a post which basically says Dirk Hartog was here, which was the Dutch way of sort of saying we're here.

The French, when they came, left bottles lying around bits of the Australian coast with messages in them, you know. I, Marion de Frasnay was here. The French come to and sail up the coast of Western Australia in 1687. A bloke called Abraham du Quesnay-Guiton cites the Swan River but keeps on sailing for the Spice Islands to the north. The French weren't terribly interested in colonisation at the time. They were interested in trade and sort of scientific discovery.

So the Spanish would have taken a more active interest if they'd stopped off. French and Dutch, not so much. And even the Brits, when Cook arrives in 1770, Joseph Banks, you know, the scientific go-to guy aboard the Endeavour. He's a botanist who gives the name Botanist. He's a botanist who is the inspiration for Mr Spock in Star Trek. He and James Cook was the inspiration for James Kirk. Star Trek was modelled on the Endeavour voyage.

But Banks says the country reminded him of the back of a lean cow and his sort of scathing of its suitability for settlement. Until 1878 when he has a change of heart, the American War of Independence, Britain's desperately looking for somewhere new to dump its convicts and Banks says, well, this place wasn't so bad. But you still have a period of 10 years where the Brits look at the idea of convict settlements in East Africa, the West Indies. They again try to send some convicts

to the Americas, the Mosquito Coast. New South Wales was very much an afterthought and it appealed to the Brits not so much because of anything that Cook or Banks said, but it was so geographically isolated. There was no other Western settlement about. And when you sent your convicts to America, they kept on popping on boats and coming home. The idea was that if you dumped convicts in Botany Bay,

which rapidly moved to Sydney, they wouldn't be able to get back. And so that ended up being... Except Magwitch. Magwitch does come back. Yeah. Well, look, the irony is that the first convicts actually escaped within a couple of weeks aboard French vessels. Peter Paris, a French waiter, hitched a ride off, yeah, from La Perouse.

So they went off to France, did they? Well, the La Perouse expedition pops up in Botany Bay just a few days after Philip arrives in 1788, and there's this, geez, the French are here, and there's lots of them. They camp in Botany Bay for a while, and two of the convicts, or lots of the convicts run from Sydney to Botany Bay and hold up their little hitchhiking sides, please take us home. Two of them escape and the La Perouse expedition probably founded off the Solomon Islands and most of them

were eaten. But eaten? Yes, the Solomon Islanders liked French food. Oh, my God. And so, David, Australia begins. Indeed. So hopefully we could continue this story. We should definitely continue this story. We should definitely do a part two. Yes, so if you were willing to come back that would be that would be fantastic do uh no look i'd i'd love to talk with you about the founding of the wonderful convict colony of new south wales yeah if we can take the story then from that to ian botham then everybody will be happy

i i think that we should um wait until uh this uh next ashes series is over before indulging in too much sport related banter because I'm slightly nervous because we remember what happened when the last Captain Cook, Alistair Cook came to Australia and it wasn't it was well it was they basically got eaten I do

have several cricket stories in my books. That's part of the rich tapestry of British Australian history. I can't wait. I can't wait. David, thanks so much for that. That was absolutely fabulous.

And hopefully we'll speak to you soon. Thank you very much, Tom. Thanks, Dominic. All right. Thank you, David. Bye, everybody. See you next time. Good day. everybody see you next time good day thanks for listening to the rest is history for bonus

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