Macassan Cultural Influence on Aborigines

Prior to being banned from Australia in 1908, thousands of Macassans visited Australia annually on monsoon winds in order to trade and gather pearls and trepang. Over the centuries they affected the culture of Aborigines that they traded with. They showed Aborigines along Australia’s northern coast a wider world, and demonstrated to them that there were foreign people of different colour who could be dealt with, and such relationships could be managed to the benefit of Aborigines. The sophistication, confidence, and knowledge attained though this relationship was observed and commented upon by European explorers and settlers. The contact between Macassan traders and Aborigines took place over a long time and was geographically widespread, although more concentrated in areas like East Arnhem Land and Napier Broome Bay. The influence of the contact on Aboriginal culture and technology was profound. The Macassan traders affected Aboriginal culture, religion, language, economy, and technology, as well as affecting Aboriginal expectations of foreign visitors...

...[Historian] Derek Mulvaney is critical of ‘Europocentric’ historians who ignore the effect of Asians on Australian history, singling out Andrew Sharp’s statement in The Discovery of Australia, that Asian ‘knowledge made no impact on the world at large or on the history of Australia.’5  Mulvaney considered the influence of Macassans on Aboriginal culture to be strong, arguing that:

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[Anthropologist] Mulvaney also described the effect of the relationship between the Macassans and Aborigines in these terms:


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Peter Worsley, who conducted field research in Groote Eylandt in1952-3 for the Australian National University, considered the Macassan relationship influential on the religious and social organisation of Aborigines on Groote Eylandt, as well as affecting the way they evaluated their past 8:


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Anthropologist Donald Thomson, who conducted research in Arnhem Land in the 1930’s, considered that the Macassans set a benchmark for conduct of foreign visitors in Arnhem Land:


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Historian Alan Powell argues that the impact of large numbers of Macassan traders visiting Australia may be the reason why the Northern Territory’s coastal Aborigines were better able to cope with European attempts of colonisation:

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Anthropologist Ian Crawford has written that Islamic beliefs such as the existence of Allah, the unity of mankind, and the existence of a universal law for mankind ‘provided Yolngu with a means of both comprehending and coping with developments’ that came with dealing with outsiders. Crawford argues that these beliefs have been used by Yolngu as “a conceptual weapon…in the struggle against domination against the ‘Other’.’12  Berndt and Berndt argue that contact with Macassans prepared Arnhem Landers, in some measure, for the cultural clash with Europeans.13

Crawford writes that ‘fleets of perahus sailing to the northern coasts of Australia in search of bêche-de mer opened to Aborigines a vision of a wider world.’ 14  The visitors from the East Indies opened up a wider world to Aborigines they visited, not just through their own presence, but by employing Aborigines to work on their perahus which took them around the northern Australian coast and sometimes even to the East Indies Islands to the north. Charley Djaladari, told Berndt and Berndt of what he had seen at Makassar:


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In 1841, Port Essington settler, George Earl, remarked upon the Aborigines who were seen travelling with the Macassans in their praus:


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Berndt and Berndt noted that those Aborigines that had returned from such a journey ‘liked to talk of their journey through the islands to Macassar, and around the camp fires stories were told and songs were composed about what they had seen.’ 17


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Groote Eylandt elder Galiawa Nalanbayayaya Wurramarrba narrates how his father travelled to Makassar:

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Urry and Walsh argue that there must have been a substantial influence on Aborigines who visited the East Indies.20  This opinion is supported by Earl’s 1846 observation regarding Aborigines returning from Makassar:

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Captain Collet Barker, commandant at Raffles Bay, recorded in his journal an interview with a Macassan perahu captain who informed Barker about East Arnhem Land Aborigines:

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On 7 May 1829 six praus appeared. 'In the last prau,' Barker recorded, 'I understood there were four…blacks who were going to Macassar.'” 23 Certainly, in the last days of the Macassan trade there were many Aborigines visiting Macassar and even living there as Charley Djaladjari told Berndt and Berndt in the 1940’s:

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Berndt and Berndt describe Makassar as a ‘Mecca for of the northeast Arnhem Landers.’ 25  Aborigines who had travelled to foreign lands must have profoundly changed the world view of their families and tribes upon their return to Australia. James Urry and Michael Walsh discuss the fact that “Aborigines appear to have joined the praus voluntarily” and suggest that Aborigines may have been travelling with the Macassans due to having adopted the Islamic religion, and write that “the issue of religious conversion should not be overlooked.”26  Earl encountered some of these Aboriginal Muslims at Port Essington (1841):

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Another factor suggesting religious conversion amongst Aborigines was the intermarriage with Macassans, which would have been socially unacceptable on the Macassan side without converting the Aborigines to Islam. In the late 1940’s, Ronald and Catherine Berndt noticed that some of the people they encountered in Arnhem Land had physical features which suggested East Indies ancestry.28  Berndt and Berndt write that in the early periods of contact, relations between Aboriginal women and Macassan men were well-regulated.29  The traditional arrangement was that Aborigines should provide wives for their trading partners.30  Charley Djaladjari informed Berndt and Berndt that he had met several Aboriginal men and women who in Makassar who had married locals.31  Barbara Laklak Ganambarr, a Yolngu woman, tells how her grandfather told her that when the Macassans went back to their country:

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Archaelogical, documentary, and oral evidence demonstrates that the trepang trade was most intense in the region around Arnhem Land, while a less intense relationship occurred in the Kimberley region. Berndt argues that the East of Arnhem Land is the area of longest contact: “no other group of Aborigines in the Northern Territory, or perhaps in all Australia, has been subjected to such intensive contact with alien peoples, over such a long period of years…”33

In East Arnhem Land the attitude of Aborigines towards inter-gender relations was affected by the culture and attitude of the traders. In South Sulawesi, there are cultural boundaries between women and men who are not close relatives.34  This influence on Aboriginal culture was observed by Warner observed that in the East of Arnhem Land, Aborigines were protective of their wives and did not like to share their wives with others.35  Berndt and Berndt also noted that in areas where the cultural influence of the East Indies traders was greatest, such as in Groote Eylandt, women were segregated from men, and were jealously guarded from European and Japanese intruders. Women in these areas also had a notion of physical modesty, covering their private parts. In East Arnhem Land, and on Groote Eylandt, European explorers and missionaries noticed that Aboriginal women did not mix with strangers, and went to the bother of covering their private parts. A newspaper article regarding Arnhem Land in 1934 describes inter-gender relations on Groote Eylandt:

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In 1803 Flinders noted at Caledon Bay, in northeast Arnhem Land, that the only female that could see ‘wore a small piece of bark, in guise of a fig leaf.’37  Crawford that in the Kimberley an elderly man who died in the 1970’s had earlier informed his translator that he had seen an Aboriginal woman that on a trepanging boat wearing a grass or fabric skirt.38  This is likely to have been a result of the influence of Southeast Asian Islamic thought affecting Aboriginal culture. Intermarriage would have helped to spread cultural ideas about women. This attitude toward women is contrasted in the East coast of Australia where Aboriginal women could be seen by early explorers such as Captain James Cook who wrote:

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Outside of Arnhem Land,40   and even in Western Arnhem Land, which saw less Macassan contact, Aborigines were less protective of their women.41  Warner wrote that wife-lending and prostitution was common in the West, however he did not discover such conduct in East Arnhem Land.42...

...In the 1940’s Berndt and Berndt noticed that venereal disease was rare in eastern Arnhem Land, whereas it was more prevalent in Western Arnhem Land, which had less influence from the Macassans.44   In Western Arnhem Land, the Goulbourn Island Mission authorities had stated that in the 1940’s, 80 per cent of the population had been infected with venereal disease.45  The Aborigines in Western Arnhem Land informed Berndt and Berndt that they did not suffer from venereal disease in the days of early Macassan contact.46  Venereal disease seems to have been introduced at the time of European contact.47  Dr Cecil Strangman, Protector of Aborigines for the Northern Territory in 1908 considered Europeans to be the source of gonorrhoeal infections.48  Considering the devastating effect sexually transmitted diseases had on Aborigines population levels in other parts of Australia through its often resulting infertility, it is likely that the practice of segregating women from strangers saved the East Arnhem Land from a significant drop in population that had occurred in Aboriginal communities elsewhere. Another aspect of introduced Macassan culture was observed by John Lort Stokes, an officer onboard the HMS Beagle, who found that Aboriginal inhabitants of Arnhem Land possessed clothing, which he had not seen elsewhere in Australia:

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Stokes later added this explanatory footnote regarding the clothing:

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Considering the warm climate in the area...[and]...that the region was visited by trepangers, and Muslim Aboriginal men had visited the nearby colony at Port Essington, it seems likely that the wearing of clothes was a result of the influence of the Muslim trepangers.

History of Australia’s Muslim cameleers

More than one million feral dromedary camels are wandering around the Australian outback, stripping vegetation and knocking down fences. They're viewed as pests, and there are plans to cull them.

[b]Burke and Wills expedition

Following a few small-scale exploration successes with camels in the late 1850s, the Victorian Expedition Committee in 1859 commissioned a local businessman who exported to India to buy camels and recruit cameleers. On 9 June 1860, 24 camels and three cameleers arrived at Port Melbourne, to join the pioneering Burke and Wills expedition


While the expedition successfully made it from the south coast to the north, through the heart of Australia,

“Until the arrival of motorised transport in the interior, in the early 1920s, there were only camels. It was the only way to get across great stretches of land.”

   

The expedition set out from Royal Park Melbourne at about 4 pm on 20th August 1860.
The 19 men of the expedition included 5 englishmen,6 Irishmen,4 Indian sepoys,3 Germans and an American.
They took 23 horses,6 wagons and 26 camels.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burke_and_Wills_expedition#Departure_from_Melbourne

   A small number of cameleers were of the sikh religion.

Does anyone else notice how muslims downplay the contribution of the sikh cameleers like in the Burke and Wills expedition to claim the muslims were there.

http://www.cameleers.net/?page_id=2