Dutch Reach Australia

In 1606, the Dutch navigator Willem Janszoon, sailing in the ship Duyfken, made the first well-documented European landing on the Australian continent. His voyage along the western coast of Cape York Peninsula did not lead to settlement, and Janszoon himself never realized he had found a new continent. Even so, it opened a long chapter of European encounters with a land that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples had inhabited for tens of thousands of years.

The background lay in the expansion of Dutch trade in Asia. The Dutch East India Company, or VOC, was founded in 1602 and quickly sought to dominate the spice trade from bases in the Indonesian archipelago, especially Bantam and later Batavia. Company officials wanted to find new markets and sources of goods, and rumors circulated of lands to the south of New Guinea, possibly rich in gold. Europeans had long speculated about a great southern land, often called Terra Australis, though no one knew whether it existed.

Janszoon left Bantam in late 1605 in the small ship Duyfken, meaning "Little Dove," and sailed along the southern coast of New Guinea. He then crossed toward the south and followed the Cape York coastline, probably in early 1606. The exact landing place is debated, but it is usually placed near the Pennefather River on the western side of the peninsula. Janszoon's party mapped roughly 300 kilometers of coast, though he apparently thought it was an extension of New Guinea. Encounters with local people were hostile, and some of the crew were killed. Janszoon turned back, naming nothing of lasting importance, and the voyage was considered a disappointment because it found no promising trade opportunities.

Janszoon's report and charts nonetheless contributed to Dutch knowledge of the region. Over the next decades, other Dutch captains charted more of the northern, western and southern coasts, including Dirk Hartog in 1616 and Abel Tasman in the 1640s. The continent came to be called New Holland. Tasman's voyages also revealed Van Diemen's Land, later Tasmania, and New Zealand. However, the VOC judged the land to be barren and unprofitable and never colonized it.

The legacy of 1606 is mostly symbolic and cartographic. Janszoon's voyage is a landmark in the European record, though it was not the first contact with Australia from outside: Indigenous Australians had long-standing relationships with neighbors, and trepangers from Makassar are known to have visited northern shores, probably from the 1700s or earlier. Later British colonization from 1788 would transform the continent, but the Dutch chapter left a trace in early maps and in place names such as Arnhem Land.