First Contact with whitefullas

Claiming and naming another people’s country

The oldest recorded contact between the New World and the original residents of the Mitchell River Delta happened in the 1600’s. The Dutch visited the region during their early exploration of New Holland (Now known as Australia) 170 years before Captain Cook arrived.

Jan Carstenzoon in his vessel the Arnhem visited the Mitchell River in 1623 where he captured two men possibly from near the Mitchell River. They died later on the way back to Batavia. The only remaining traces of their visit were some names given to some places on the Gulf coast.

The Mitchell River was called the Vereneeschde Revier on the 4th of May 1623 by Carstenszoon. The Nassau Revier was named out of respect to Maurice of Nassau.

Maurits van Oranje; 14 November 1567 – 23 April 1625) was sovereign Prince of Orange from 1618, on the death of his eldest half brother, Philip William, Prince of Orange, (1554–1618). Maurice was stadtholder of the United Provinces of the Netherlands (except in the province of Friesland) from earliest 1585 until his death in 1625. The Staaten River was named Staaten Revier after the Staaten Generaal (The Dutch Parliament). Both rivers kept their original Dutch Names from an earlier visit. Another was the Golf van Carpentier now known as the Gulf of Carpentaria named by Carstenszoon in honour of Pieter de Carpentier, the Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies in what is now known as Indonesia.

Present day Cape York was known to the Dutch as Carpentier after the same person.

Other places in Australia named by the Dutch were renamed by other European explorers centuries later including the Englishman, Matthew Flinders who sailed around Australia including the Gulf region in 1802-03 and Frenchman, Nicolas Baudin in his boat, le Geographe.

In 1802 England and France were at war and in a race to discover and claim foreign lands for themselves.

Both Flinders and Baudin are recorded as having had respect for indigenous people in their exploration in Australian waters.

Flinders lost a crew member at Blue Mud Bay and an Aboriginal man was shot in late January 1802 (Scott, Chapter 18 2004).

Baudin was unusual for his time when he gave his view on indigenous rights in a private letter to Governor King of NSW when he left Port Jackson (Sydney) in 1802. The French Government may not have had the same idea as their explorer Nicolas Baudin especially with France and England at war.

“To my way of thinking, I have never been able to conceive that there was justice or even fairness on the part of Europeans in seizing, in the name of their governments, a land seen for the first time, when it was inhabited by men who have not always deserved the title of savages, or cannibals, that has been freely given them; … it would be infinitely more glorious for your nation, as for mine, to mould for society the inhabitants of its own country, over whom it has rights, rather than wishing to occupy itself with the improvement of those who are far removed from it, by beginning with seizing the soil which belongs to them and which saw their birth.” [HRNSW, vol. V].

Flinders would later become known for the number of names he gave the features of the country that he visited during his voyages in Australian waters (Scott Chapter 18 2004). France and England were eager to attach their names to someone else’s lands and country as were the Dutch of the 1600’s. Exploring nations were unaware, or did not care, that the country that they ‘found’ carried many thousands of named sites and places given by the original indigenous people of the Mitchell River Delta. Pinarinch being the Nassau, Marrpaw the Topsy Creek, Yengkr and Wurrpa on the South Mitchell and Kun’mul on the Main Mitchell River to the north.

A small iron cannon found at Nar near Wurrpa was “discovered” and removed by a pioneering pastoralist of Lochnigar Station in 1919 and was sent to the Queensland Museum. The cannon is now held at Kowanyama and remains the only tangible evidence of early exploration. The cast iron deck signal gun had

The cannon is not Dutch and looks like it might be an English cannon of the early 1800’s

been cared for by local clansmen as an object used in Frigate bird increase ceremonies before its “discovery” by the grazier. Being iron, the gun is almost certainly from a later period than the Dutch exploration of the Gulf of Carpentaria when cannons were bronze. (Pers com Ben Cropp 2014)