REGULAR FEATURES
Truth Telling
our ORIGINAL HISTORY FIRST EXPLORERS
Barry Clark Bribie Island Historical Society
MORE BRIBIE HISTORY The next Historical Society meeting is Wednesday 13 JULY at 6;30 pm at the RSL Club. when our guest speaker will tell the history of the Caboolture Historical Village You can see more Bribie history on our new Web Site Bribiehistoricalsociety. org.au and our Blog Site http://bribieislandhistory. blogspot.com or contact us on bribiehistoricalsociety@ gmail.com 36
Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan was the first person to sail around the world in 1521, going west from Europe to Asia, and naming the Pacific Ocean, but did not see this great southern continent before being killed with a poison arrow in the Philippines. More than 100 years later in 1642, Dutchman Abel Tasman sailed all around this huge continent, but saw only the tip of what he named Van Diemen’s Land, now Tasmania. Two years later he named the north coast of the continent New Holland, and many other explorers over the next 120 years were wrecked on the vast coastline, but there is no record of anyone claiming the east coast until James Cook in 1770. During that period the British East India Company became the words biggest
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The Bribie Islander
business, controlling 26% of the world’s population and trade for 200 years, making the British Empire the world’s largest monopoly.
successfully modified and managed the landscape to provide food and resources throughout 60,000 years of change.
It took a long time for Europeans to discover this great south land.
CIVILISATION
INITIAL CONTACT When early explorers made first contact with the ‘natives” of this land they found Aboriginal society very different, and beyond their comprehension. English explorer William Dampier sailed the northwest coast in 1688, describing the people as “the most miserable people in the world”, because as far as he could see they had no houses, did not use metal, and did not farm or worship anything. Explorers could not appreciate the unfamiliar landscapes and radically different way of life, nor could they see that indigenous people had
The concept of “civilization” for societies with constructed monuments, systems of writing and agriculture came into the English language to describe cultures such as Egyptian, Greek and Roman. Theories about human development, natural selection and a hierarchy of races also developed around that time, using terms such as “Primitive” and “Stone Age”. By the early 1900’s modern science began to reveal the complexity of indigenous Australian society, and realise that the first people had come by sea from what is now Indonesia, over 60,000 years ago, and described the first residents as having:
