The Necessity of Reparation for Historic Injustices

Fascinating read on Northern Australian trade routes pre Colonisation.
The more that is uncovered pre European invasion the more incredibly rich the culture is showing to have been.
Would be unreal to discover more about how this place worked before we came along and changed it forever.
Read on.....
"AUSTRALIA’S PRE-COLONIAL SEAFARING TRADE
Groundbreaking archaeological research has confirmed scientifically what Indigenous peoples already knew, that first Australians were making huge overseas voyages to trade in a vast international network at least three millennia earlier than previously thought.
The common perception is that Australia’s culture evolved like its flora and fauna, in profound isolation across a deep history until Europeans arrived.
The archaeological record now shows as far back as 3000 years ago or more people from mainland Australia were building ocean-going double outrigger canoes up to 20 metres long and loading them up with crew and valuable goods and sailing thousands of kilometres to trade in distant lands.
Walmbaar Aboriginal Corporation director Kenneth McLean, a Dingaal Traditional Owner of Jiigurru, or Lizard Island, 33 kilometres off the Queensland coast says the discovery of artefacts that demonstrate the far-flung trade links of people from Cape York may enable his people to share a story they already knew with world.
“Our elders passed knowledge down through generations for us, teaching us how the old people were living back in the day, way before Captain Cook ever came,” McLean says.
“Hopefully we can educate Australians and the people around the world on how old our country is, and how old the international trade is.”
It’s commonly known that Makassan traders from the island of Sulawesi, in modern day Indonesia, were sailing south to Australia several hundred years ago, in the 1700s. Up until 1907 they traded iron and other goods with the locals of Arnhem Land and the Kimberleys in exchange for trepang, also known as sea cucumbers, and sold them into China.
Despite the cultural heritage of traditional owners along the coastline of Cape York, it is not well known that Aboriginal people had been sailing across the Coral Sea for thousands of years to trade.
About 3500 years ago the Lapita people, who colonised the western Pacific, came down from northern Vietnam or southern China or Taiwan and moved south to the Bismark Archipelago north of New Guinea and migrated eastwards to the Solomon Islands, Fiji, New Caledonia and Vanuatu.
Archaeologist Sean Ulm is the deputy director at the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage. He says the distinctive pottery of the Lapita is an archaeological calling card of their migration across Oceania.
It was accepted knowledge that Lapita migration from its starting place in the northern hemisphere only ever moved eastwards across the Bismark Archipelago to the northern New Guinea coast and then radiated across the Pacific.
Experts had uncovered no evidence that these seafaring people sailed west along the southern New Guinea coastline, until 2008 when a team of archaeologists started digging at a site in Caution Bay around 30 kilometres west of Port Moresby, ahead of a planned gas plant development.
Professor Ulm says he and a team of archaeologists “almost immediately” found Lapita pottery that was radiocarbon dated to 2800 years old.
“The team published that work for the first time in 2011 and it was met in the academic community with a lot of critique that it couldn’t possibly be Lapita, because Lapita people didn’t go westward along the southern New Guinea coast, they only went east (into the Pacific),” Ulm says.
“But, you know, here we are 10 years later and none of those critics disagree with us now. So it was a huge paradigm shift in the way people thought about the colonisation of the huge part of the planet and opened the door to suggest, if these people were in southern New Guinea 3000 years ago, where else could they be? They have watercraft, technology and seagoing technology.”
Anthropological archaeologist Ian McNiven also works with the Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage. He says archaeologists also started finding pottery in Torres Strait around 20 years ago, but there was “no historical or ethnographic or oral history of pottery production by Torres Strait Islanders”.
They started working with communities on excavations and found pottery for the first time. It was buried one metre under the ground, relatively deep in archaeological terms. The shards of pottery were discovered on Lizard Island by Ulm and McNiven in 2017.
“Everybody’s was saying ‘hey, that’s very different’. I’m saying bloody oath that’s different! That was unexpected,” McNiven says.
He says it appears pottery was traded into Torres Strait from New Guinea 3000 years ago, and some was produced locally. Finding a connection between the Lapita and Torres Strait, once they were known to have moved westwards across New Guinea, was not entirely unexpected, he says. But what came next on Lizard Island was a bolt from the blue.
“What was unexpected is finding similar pottery, of similar age on Lizard Island. It is 600 kilometres down the Queensland coast and that makes you say hang on, this is a serious game changer,” Professor McNiven says.
It was a seminal moment.
“You can literally hold a piece of pottery when we’re doing excavations on Lizard Island and pull it out from a metre underground, a piece the size of your thumbnail, and you say: everything changes after this,” McNiven says. “A little tiny piece like that changes the way we view the history of our continent and its interactions in the past, the Indigenous peoples with the outside world.
“Now we know Aboriginal peoples of North Queensland have these ancient connections going up through Torres Strait and into New Guinea and the pottery is telling us that it’s the calling card of people who are interacting over literally thousands of kilometres.”
McNiven, based at Monash University, says the evidence suggested it was not just the goods, but the knowledge of pottery making that had been passed on to people in Queensland.
“That Lizard Island pottery looks like it was made locally,” he says. “All the minerals in the pottery are essentially what you get around Lizard Island and that part of Cape York.”
Professor Ulm, of James Cook University, explained the pottery shards are smoking gun evidence that overturn the idea of Australia’s ancient isolation.
“There’s long been arguments that after people colonised Australia, somehow they lost that watercraft navigation technology, but we simply don’t know that because watercraft made out of organic materials don’t survive in the archaeological record,” he says.
“So these pottery finds, for example that we have on Lizard Island or in Torres Strait, show us that people are voyaging. Even though we don’t have the watercraft, it’s indirect evidence that people were making these voyages and we can trace how this knowledge or the objects themselves are moving.”
The historical evidence of trade across communities in the Coral Sea is extensive. These recent finds along with artefacts collected by 18th and 19th Century European voyagers shows a complex trading web across the region where goods particular to one location - including bamboo smoking pipes, canoes, spears and necklaces, as well as language and cultural practices - were passed back and forth across a long network. This has given rise to the concept of the Coral Sea Cultural Interaction Sphere.
Piecing together what was traded and by whom shows it involved hundreds of clans and dozens of language groups.
The groundbreaking pottery archaeology and evidence of ancient trading networks is showcased in a new exhibition, developed in partnership with the Walmbaar Aboriginal Corporation and Hope Vale Congress Aboriginal Corporation. Connections across the Coral Sea is at the Museum of Tropical Queensland in Townsville. It will move to Brisbane in June.
Professor Ulm says evidence for two-way trade, from New Guinea to Australia and vice-versa, overturned false stereotypes that had prevailed in historical assumptions about Aboriginal peoples.
“There was a prevailing view throughout the 19th and early 20th Century that any traded goods came south from New Guinea, but nothing went north,” Professor Ulm says.
“This was feeding into a racist construct that Aboriginal cultures are somehow simplistic and New Guinea and Melanesian cultures are somehow advanced were of course objects would only come south.
“But even in the 19th century, in the early 20th century, when writers began writing that, it wasn’t supported by the evidence then.
“We know that the Gulf of Carpentaria was linked to Adelaide, and Broome was linked to Alice Springs. But if you know what you’re doing you can cover a lot bigger distances in a boat than you can walking, carrying all your goods with you.”
Professor McNiven says Western science and Australia are “catching up with what Indigenous communities have known for a very long time”.
Australia was seen to be the only continent on the planet that didn’t have a pottery tradition, and that sort of played into all sorts of colonial representations of Indigenous people as being primitive or backward,” he says.
He says even though there were historical records of Australia’s international trading links preceding European settlement, it wasn’t studied systematically until the 1970s.
“Matthew Flinders was cruising around Australia in 1802 and comes into Arnhem Land and sees a whole fleet of Makassan vessels and goes ‘Excuse me, what’s going on here?’, I thought the British were the ones making the outside connections. But groups like the Yolngu Aboriginal community were going, come on, keep up. We’ve been doing this for hundreds of years mate.”
- by Mike Foley Sydney Morning Herald / The Age"

^^^ good read SR , so much history that we don’t know about . It would be interesting to read some of Chinese history earliest interactions .

Great call @supa. I'm sure there'd be early recordings somewhere from way back in Chinese history. All these threads are slowly piecing together. It's unreal watching the history slowly unfold to help paint a picture beyond the frivolity of the last 200 years.

Australia is more racist than even i gave it credit for. And i really thought it was racist already.
Shiver me timber.

The trading of Trepang is a whole other story.
It was going on for centuries, Indonesian seafarers making their way to Australia, purchasing and trading sea cucumber.
Routes into and out of Australia were established at a time way earlier than first thought by European settlers.
Our Aborigines were way ahead of time of so called ‘developed’ countries to our west.
It shames me to still think of how ignorant, arrogant and dismissive our own and other countries have been towards the longest continual culture of a human population on earth.
How about, just for once, we champion these people for what they really are, incredible resilient achievers.

Sean Ulm is a close colleague of my ex wife, I’ve met him on several occasions, wonderful guy. AW

Okay SR we have been agreeing too much of late, and we need a break from that USA thread.

IMHO it seems like a bit of a straw clutching article.

I dont see any evidence whatsoever in that article for the intro claim.

"that first Australians were making huge overseas voyages"

There is evidence Indonesians/Makasar people came here and traded for sea cucumber, there is even cave paintings of their boats.

But If FNP had that same open ocean sea going ability and were doing the same thing, they would have highly likely recorded what they had seen elsewhere when they returned and brought back ideas they had seen that we would see groups in say the north area take on different ideas with clear influence from the places they visited, they also would likely have brought back seeds of plants useful which would result in seeing non native plants in the areas that these boats departed from.

We would see obvious influence's from the people of closest areas of Sumba, Rote, East Timor, likely through adoption or influence of their designs and motives in cave art etc

And the idea there is no boats because they are made of wood is silly, when white fella come they would have recorded seeing these large sea going boats, " ocean-going double outrigger canoes up to 20 metres long" (with sails) once they started going elsewhere they wouldn't stop they would continue and expand on the journeys and boats.

No doubt FNP in the far Cape York area had interaction with Torres's straight and PNG people, the distance between island's there isn't great, large canoes that FNP had could easily do those distances even paddling (you should see the distances between islands they do in tiny canoes in Indo) and you would expect in most cases islands could be seen in the distance to travel too, thats very realistic, but traveling hundreds of Kilometres towards nothing but open blue water making it and returning is not, even if they made the journey one way returning is another thing.

BTW. There could have been belief's/stories/mythology of what was out there that prevented any motivation to see and anyone that tried and didn't return would confirm these beliefs.

A quick google shows Lapita pottery is found in PNG as is other pottery, so obviously it came here the same way it got there or came here via PNG.

It's surprising that FNP really never had pottery, but then again being nomadic you dont want to be carting around heavy clay pots and there wasn't any domesticated animal to help move these items.