Early+visitors

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In the north, ... "Muslim sailors left the harbour of Macassar in the Celebes and sailed 2,000 kilometres south with the December monsoons to gather trepang or //bêche de mer// in the shallow seas of northern Australia. The sausage-shaped creatures were boiled in large iron cauldrons and cured in smoke-houses built of bamboo matting. Some Aborigines made friends, others attacked the intruders. When the wind changed at the end of the wet season, the Macassans sailed home with cargoes of Australian trepang to be sold in Chinese markets. They left red pottery, green glass bottles, smoking pipes, scraps of iron lying on the beaches; and the bodies of those who died, facing Mecca." (from "The Ashton Scholastic History of Australia" by Manning Clark, Meredith Hooper and Susanne Ferrier, Scholastic, Sydney, 1988, p. 21.)

..."Indications of some foreign people having visited this group were almost as numerous, and as widely extended as those left by the natives. Besides pieces of earthen jars and trees cut with axes, we found remnants of bamboo lattice work, palm leaves sewed with cotton thread into the form of such hats as are worn by the Chinese, and the remains of blue cotton trousers, of the fashion called moormans. A wooden anchor of one fluke, and three boats rudders of violet wood were also found; but what puzzled me most was a collection of stones piled together in a line, resembling a low wall, with short lines running perpendicularly at the back, dividing the space behind into compartments. In each of these were the remains of a charcoal fire, and all the wood near at hand, had been cut down. Mr. Brown saw on another island a similar construction, with not less than thirty-six partitions, over which was laid a rude piece of frame work; and the neighbouring mangroves, to the extent of an acre and a half, had been cut down. It was evident that these people were Asiatics, but of what particular nation, or what their business here, could not be ascertained; I suspected them, however, to be Chinese, and that the nutmegs might possibly be their object. From the traces amongst Wellesley's Islands, they had been conjectured to be shipwrecked people; but that opinion did not now appear to be correct." (from "A Voyage to Terra AustralisVolume 2 Chapter 7," by Matthew Flindersviewed at [|http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks/e00050.html#chapter2-7] in 2012.)

A film clip showing modern fishing of trepang, discussing its history as described above.

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