Lately been reading quite a bit about early Australian/Pacific exploration and into today's paper came across a story about plans to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the first documented European contact with Australia .In 1606 Willem Janszoon captain of the dutch sailing ship, the Duyfken, and his dutch crew sighted and charted 320km of Australian coast around Cape York peninsula. There's a replica of the same ship berthed on the Swan river and in April its planned for it to sail and visit 25 ports around the country to celebrate the anniversary . Worth checking out if it calls in , although small its a great looking vessel
yeah she is moored about 2km from my office. I often see it sailing on the Swan River, but how the hell they going to get her under the Freemantle Bridge is going to be fun!!!
You can even get to do a day sail on her as a company team building etc.. thing.
Aslo you had to have bells of size to sail in that little thing from europe to here and back, I take my hat off to those blokes... in their day, they where the kings of the sea!
Just a little aside to this, talking about early European contact with our land, in the Wentworth Museum (NSW/Vic border) you will find a tree stump that was removed from under the stump of a river red gum (yes these mighty trees often grow on the stumps of previous tree's) at the banks of the mouth of the Darling river in the late 70's, the interesting thing about this tree stump is that the tree it once belonged to was cut down with an axe, you can clearly see the axe marks, something the aboriginals didnt do, it could only have been someone from Europe, big deal you say, well the tree that it was found under was aged (you can count the rings for yourself from a slab sample) and started it's life around 1700, that means that someone cut the origional tree down with an axe before 1700 and at wentworth, hundreds of Klm's up the Murray river, go figure. Proof that someone settled here and explored inland around 100 years before previously thought?
Interesting story Nightshift.
I saw an episode of The Bush Tucker Man and he has some pretty good evidence to suggest there was a colony of Dutch settlers that survived for many decades in the 1600's and 1700's somewhere in central Australia after landing on the north west coast. There's a lot of unknown history before 1788 in Australia, and unfortunately we'll probably never learn much about it.
I went and had a look at the Duyfken in Pt Adelaide last Friday. It's certainly a bit different to most of the other sailing ships that I've looked at. I wouldn't want to sail on it in wild weather, that's for sure!
Here's a couple of pictures I took while I was there.
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