Were There Dutch Castaways in Central Australia? By Tony Thomas.
Was there a colony of up to 300 Dutch people living in Central Australia from about 1710 until they died out before 1860? If that were true, a mass of Australian history would have to be re-written. To even suggest it invites the same mockery anyone gets about UFOs or finding Lasseter’s lost gold reef. And yet there is strong documentary backing for this story of a Dutch settlement in central Australia long before Captain Cook and the landing at Botany Bay.
Finding and marshalling this evidence has been the life’s work of an Australian authority on survival in bush and desert – the “Bush Tucker Man” Les Hiddins AM, of Townsville. Everyone knows how Hiddins, 76, can find edible grub and drinkable water, rather than doing a perish. …
I’d better add here that Hiddins’ Dutch-colony story has nothing to do with fake Aboriginal Professor Bruce Pascoe of Melbourne University and his fake “Aboriginal agriculture” compilations. Whereas our historians dance along with Pied Piper Pascoe, they won’t give five minutes to Hiddins and his 30 years of painstaking research into a massive Australian mystery. …
1/ In 1708 three Dutch ships, Mercurius, Zuiderburg and the “great vessel” Concordia, set off from Batavia to the Netherlands. They hit a storm south of the Sunda Strait and Zuiderburg and Concordia were wrecked.
2/ Concordia was of 900 tonnes with 130 on board, including – as Hiddins established via Dutch archivists — an officer named Constantijn Van Baerle. Hiddins’ claim, based on the prevailing currents, is that 80 men and 10 women survivors, including van Baerle, wound up somewhere on the north/west coast of WA and with some access to ship’s stores. His claimed sequel is that they trekked inland eastward some 2000km looking for liveable country.
3/ Hiddins says that in April 1832 a British army explorers’ party pushed due south from Raffles Bay (210km north-east of Darwin), looking for the reputed inland sea and rivers and commercial prospects.
4/ In January 1834 the respectable Leeds Mercury newspaper published 1300 words of journal entries from the expedition leader, who was named in the piece as “Lt Nixon” — a fictitious name. He described how he came across a Dutch colony of 300 people housed 800km to the south of Raffles Bay. The people had descended six or so generations (stated as 170 years but properly about 125 years) from shipwreck survivors.
5/ The settlers told Nixon their leader was named “Van Baerle”. This beyond question pins these reported 1832 Dutch colonists to the 1708 Concordia wreck and its known passenger Van Baerle. It is such an uncommon Dutch name that barely a handful of Dutch people go by it today. …
7/ Nixon said he was with them eight days. They spoke only a crude version of the original Dutch language and practised crude Christian observance and weddings. …
10/ When the first missionaries — the first white men — got to the Arranda community around Hermannsburg in 1876, the missionaries reported that Aboriginal women had Dutch Old-Testament names such as Judith, Paula and Mirjam. …
11/ There were at the time unusual numbers of fair-haired and western-looking Aboriginals around Hermannsburg. Some cave and rock art was Western rather than Aboriginal, such as pairs of sentimentally drawn “hearts”and semi-realistic portraits and profiles. A traditional Luridja owner told Hiddins that the local word for “gun” was “Muket” (Musket), notwithstanding that muskets were long obsolete when the first explorer John McDouall Stuart passed through Central Australia in 1858. …
And so on. A good read — well presented, mildly politically incorrect, and probably true.
