'Under the Banyan - In Search of the Lost History of Australia's North Coast'

Released 02/08/2021

https://boolarongpress.com.au/product/under-the-banyan-tree-in-search-of-the-lost-history-of-australias-north-coast/

This is my first book, due to be published by Boolarong Press later this year. It's 93000 words, plus a few pictures, and is a journey of discovery through the last 1000 years or so of the history of coastal North Australia and the seas and islands to its north. I'm a Marine Scientist, an Aquaculturist if you want to be specific, so there's science in it, but it's not at all academic. I don't really do academic, it bores me.

It tells the story of my PhD research, my travels through rainforests, and lagoons festooned with magnificent reefs, libraries and museums and sitting in dust or sand listening to Elders, and wandering on beaches so remote even the crocodiles were lonely. It's about travel and people, but mostly it's about history and my search for it amongst all the half truths and outright fibs we've been fed. There's an awful lot of history in that part of the world, and Northern Australia and Eastern Indonesia share so much of it that's never been told. It's complex and intriguing and rivals any in the world.

In no small measure it shaped our nation, yet I doubt more than one in a thousand Australians have any idea it exists.


In the middle of a bay, off a tiny island just off the coast of Arnhem Land in Northern Australia, there sits an ancient stone structure. One day, under the banyan where all important things in the community were discussed, I asked a couple of elders about it. 'Not ours,' they said. Then they asked me to find out what it was and who built it.

That started a quest that took me to the far corners of Arnhem Land and into the Seas and Islands to its north, into dense, aromatic spice forests, teeming cities and tiny villages, into palaces and onto back-streets and beaches where I sat in dust or on sand and listened to old stories from old men. Step by step I was led back through the centuries. Passing missionaries and frustrated colonists, I came to huge Makassan fishing fleets, Dutch map-makers and Portuguese explorers-come-slavers. Great, forgotten empires on our doorstep, rich Sultans that claimed Australia as their own, unknown settlers and miners extracting tin, manganese and gold from the rocks of Arnhem Land, and Aboriginals cultivating pearls centuries before Mikimoto.

I discovered Australia's north coast not as the remote forgotten land it is today, but as a part of the rich, vibrant tapestry that was SE Asia, a place where a mid-19th C Groote Eylandt man named Yamboka could talk of Japanese pirates with eyes painted on their great ships, of chasing huge fish with harpoons across cold seas and hunting strange furred creatures on seas white and hard as stone.

The north coast of Australia has a very different history to the rest of the continent, it's a story of international trade and industry, slavery and pride, and its people travelling to the far reaches of the world.

It's a story very few Australians know about.

Perhaps it's time they did.


And the structure that began it all? It's a sophisticated, purpose-built pond and probably Australia's oldest non-indigenous structure.

My work and study took me to some fascinating and bizarre places and I met many wonderful people, like the old man in Arnhem Land who did me the honour of teaching me the traditional Yolgnu way to cultivate pearls, as this excerpt tells:

'I asked a few Yolngu if they would show me their cultivation technique and was, at first, met with non-committal answers, until one old man asked me to stop asking and he would see? I stopped asking and about a year later, quite out of the blue, he said that he would show me. It had taken that long for everyone who mattered to agree that I could be shown.

We set a date and when the time rolled around I hired a ute in Gove and, after several hours of very rough bush tracks, I dropped my swag on the floor of his homeland's office. I was greeted by the old man's son, who was just as intrigued as I was. Now, at a guess, in his mid-forties, he had never been told about a tradition of pearl farming, let alone that his father was an expert at it.

The next morning we braved the sand flies and wandered down to the beach where the old man showed us the size and shape of the pieces of shell he needed—about the size of a thumb-nail—then we took them to a rock pool where there were several mid-sized giant clams. He said he didn't have any oysters at the moment, but they used to also grow pearls in clams and the technique was the same.'


The suggestion to turn my thesis into a book came from a lady who reviewed it. Her job was to read theses and correct language and spelling and generally make them readable. Her comment on mine was that it was very difficult to review because she became too immersed to track corrections and frequently had to go back several pages and refocus on her job.

Please have a look at it and let me know if you agree with that lady.

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