CamperTipsyouoffonthelong,fabled
historyoftheCapeYorkPeninsula
A sketch of the Torres sighting Cape YorkA POINTY
Past
Wordsdavid cook
TO THOSE of us living in the big cities, Cape
York may seem one of the last untouched
wilderness areas of our nation, but it has a long
and vital history with all the peoples of Australia.
Cape York represents about one eighth of the
area of Queensland – an area of about 234,000
square kilometres – almost equal in size to the
state of Victoria.
At the very northern tip of the country, Cape
York sits 150km south of our nearest neighbour,
New Guinea, with a smattering of small islands in
between. As such it is likely to be the first place
on Australia reached by the southerly migration
of humankind that occurred 30,000 to 120,000
years ago. Recent studies indicate the latter date
is likely to be more accurate.EARLY EXPLORATION
The Cape is home, today, to over fifty different
clans, each with their own language and culture.
The Torres Strait Islanders are a different group
and a much more recent arrival, dating back
maybe a thousand years. These indigenous
peoples occupy the islands of the Torres Straitand around the coastal tip of the Cape.
Outside exploration of the Cape and northern
Australia goes back much further than the
famed explorer, Willem Janszoon. A handful of
1000 year old African coins found on a beach on
an island off the NT in 1944 suggest that there
may have been contacts with northern Australia
going back a lot longer than we understand.
One controversial theory from a British writer is
that two huge Chinese ships examined the West
and East coasts of Australia in 1422, almost 350
years before Cook, establishing settlements and
mining valuable metals. This claim was repeated
in Australia by the Chinese Premier in 2003.
Others claim the Portuguese mapped the
northern and eastern coasts of Australia
between 1521 and 1524, using their colony of
Timor as a base. There was certainly a lot of
trade with people from Sulawesi, in modern
Indonesia, from the eighteenth century,
harvesting trepang, or sea cucumber, which had
great value in China. In fact, it’s believed that
aboriginal people from the Yolngu tribe travelled
to Singapore and the Philippines.OLD MATE JANSZOON
The first known and undisputed European
contact with the Australian mainland was in 1606
when the Dutch East India Company sent Willem
Janszoon along the southern coast of New
Guinea to explore for commercial resources.
Janszoon rounded Dolak Island on New Guinea’s
southern tip then headed south-east, coming
up on a long coast running north and south, the
western side of what today we’d know as Cape
York.
There they anchored in the estuary of
the Pennefather River where they landed,
before heading south to Cape Keerweer (Cape
Turnaround in Dutch), at which point they turned
north and sailed 300km to near the tip of the
Cape before veering off north-west to return
home.
Janszoon’s maps, and the charts of the
Spanish explorer Luis Vaz de Torres, who passed
through the passage between Australia and
New Guinea in the same year, were kept a strict
secret. De Torres appears to have been acting
on existing knowledge, because he headed for
the Strait, so its existence appears to have been
known before then.
The Strait only became known to the rest of
the world in 1769 when Scottish geographer
Alexander Dalrymple translated some Spanish
documents captured in the Philippines.
Dalrymple gave the name Torres Strait to the
newly revealed waterway south of New Guinea.
Up until this time early European maps of the
mysterious southern continent show Cape York
as a southern continuation of New Guinea.
Dalrymple was miffed when he was passed
over for command of a British naval expedition