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| Day 113 |
29 July 2000 |
| Gove |
| "Something Special" |
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Our fuel filters, ordered yesterday from Brisbane, are stuck in
Darwin because of the Darwin Show Day public holiday, so it's
not just sailing ships that get held up for peculiar reasons.
The filters should be in Gove first thing tomorrow. This hold up
puts us another day behind in our voyage to Pennefather River,
but what can we do? The wind is still howling, so we probably
wouldn't have attempted to depart anyway.
Perhaps these things happen for a reason. In the evening a
runabout pulls up alongside Duyfken and the four occupants ask
us about the ship. We invite them on board. Ricky, Charles and
Gavin, who are local Aborigines, and Jason who is from Sydney.
They are from a small settlement across the bay from Gove called
Ski Beach, which has another name but I have forgotten it. Greg
asks what the name means and Gavin says he doesn't know, it's a
Macassan word. How many Australians are aware that we have
foreign place-names along our shores as a consequence of
international trade that pre-dates colonial settlement?
Charles walks around Duyfken's decks in awe. From time to time
he slaps the oak with the palm of his hand. 'Bloody beautiful.
Solid eh? Yeah!' He wants to know about the rope and we tell him
it is tarred hemp. He tells us he was named after rope and all
the things you can make with it, like nets, sails and even
flags. Jala is his real name, a word from southern Sulawesi used
throughout Indonesia to mean netting material and nets in
general.
The more we talk to these men the more they put Duyfken in
context. In the middle of the 17th century the Macassarese went
into battle with the Dutch over trading rights and lost. They
fled their home waters, some of them sailing east. Some of the
refugees arrived in northern Australia where they stayed for
some years. When they began returning they took trepang, dried
sea cucumber, with them which they found was a valuable trading
commodity highly sought after by the Chinese. They returned for
more. Very soon a regular seasonal trade was established. The
local Aboriginal people participated in the trade and, not
surprisingly, there was a lot of cultural exchange and
intermarriage between the groups.
The trepang trade continued until 1906, when the Australian
government sent word to Macassar that foreigners would no longer
be permitted to take trepang from Australian waters. A single
perahu came to Darwin bearing gifts of silk sarongs and other
goods, along with a polite letter saying that they had heard
rumours of the ban on their trade but hoped it wasn't true. They
were sent away. So ended Australia's earliest export industry.
Duyfken's voyage into these waters was a relatively unheroic
affair in comparison with other voyages of discovery by the
likes of Tasman and Cook. Yet it is not true to say that the
Dutch influence, direct or indirect, on this part of Australia
was negligible. It's appropriate that we learn a lesson in
Australian history from our new Aboriginal friends. They tell us
it is appropriate that we, the Belanda (white) people, come in
to their country in a Dutch ship. Belanda? Isn't that the
Indonesian word for Dutch? No coincidence there.
As they are about to leave someone asks: 'So you like our ship?'
'Well', replies Jala,'It's better than nothing.' It takes some
time for the laughter to die down. He has summed up in a few
words exactly what it means to build something special.
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Peter Manthorpe
Master
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