On This Day in History: February 26

Encounter with Australia

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The first humans arrived in Australia 65,000 years ago, and things tried to kill them, so they killed them right back. There were dozens of species of megafauna on the continent. A few thousand years later, almost all were extinct. When Europeans first showed up a long time later, the locals put those ancient killing skills to use.

--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: February 26, 1606--

His name was Willem Janszoon, and he’s believed to be the first white guy to show up in Australia. And because he was the first white guy to do something, we need to write about it. That’s how it works. I didn’t make the rules. In addition to the landing, his crew members were also the first white guys to get speared by Indigenous Australians.

Janszoon was an officer in the Dutch East India Company, which was guilty of much empire-building cockassery. As captain of the Duyfken [snort giggle] he was ordered to explore the coastline of New Guinea because they were always looking for new lands to exploit. He set sail from Indonesia in mid-November of 1605, heading southeast. Continues below …

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The Torres Strait separates New Guinea from Australia, and despite being a hundred miles wide Janszoon fucking missed it, sailing right into the Gulf of Carpentaria in Northern Australia without even realizing he was now on a totally different continent. He still thought this was part of New Guinea. The crew of the Duyfken made landfall on the west side of Australia’s northernmost point, what would come to be called the Cape York Peninsula after the pasty people colonized the fuck out of the place, on February 26, 1606.

During a number of landings, he lost several men. Janszoon wrote, that “certain parts inhabited by savage, cruel black barbarians who slew some of our sailors.” And because of that he couldn’t ascertain what the “commodities obtainable” for exploitation were. Realizing he wasn’t fucking welcome, they eventually set sail for home after reaching what he termed Cape Keerweer, which is Dutch for Cape Flee in Fucking Terror. Actually it means Cape Turnback, but I like my name better.

That was Janszoon’s side of the story. The Wik-Mungkan people of the region where Janszoon turned tail tell it a different way. Passed down via oral history, their version is that the Dutch sailors were greeted by the Wik-Mungkan and they got along fine. But then the Dutch started raping the women and forcing the men to hunt food for them, which from what I know of colonial history sounds totally plausible. And then the Wik-Mungkan fought back, killing a number of Dutch, but also lost several fighters in the process to Dutch gunfire, which also scans, historically speaking.

It was 164 years later that Captain Cook claimed the continent for England, and then when Britain lost its American colonies a short time later they said fuck it let’s try again with Australia, sending a fleet of 11 ships filled with 1,400 colonizers, many of whom were convicts, in 1787 to set up a penal colony in Botany Bay.

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