page_title: Arnhem Land
section_title: Macassan contact
hierarchical_section_title: Arnhem Land / History / Macassan contact
caption_attribution_description: English: This image was borrowed from the following website: http://www.multiculturalaustralia.edu.au/history/timeline.php?myOption=Before+the+Australian+Nation&amp;currentRecord=2 ( click on the "archival image" button to retrieve the image: http://www.multiculturalaustralia.edu.au/displayWindow.php?mediaCode=img&amp;id=13 )
context_page_description: Arnhem Land is a historical region of the Northern Territory of Australia. It is located in the north-eastern corner of the territory and is around 500 km from the territory capital, Darwin. In 1623, Dutch East India Company captain Willem Joosten van Colster sailed into the Gulf of Carpentaria and Cape Arnhem is named after his ship, the Arnhem, which itself was named after the city of Arnhem in the Netherlands.
  The area covers about 97,000 square kilometres and has an estimated population of 16,000, of whom 12,000 are Indigenous Australians. The region's service hub is Nhulunbuy, 600 square kilometres east of Darwin, set up in the early 1970s as a mining town. Other major population centres are Yirrkala, Gunbalanya, Ramingining, and Maningrida.
  A substantial proportion of the population, which is mostly Aboriginal, lives on small outstations or homelands. This outstation movement started in the early 1980s. Many Aboriginal groups moved to usually very small settlements on their traditional lands, often to escape the problems of the larger towns.
context_section_description: At least since the 18th century (and probably earlier) Muslim traders from Makassar of Sulawesi visited Arnhem Land each year to trade, harvest, and process sea cucumbers  or trepang.  This marine animal is highly prized in Chinese cuisine, for folk medicine, and as an aphrodisiac.
  This Macassan contact with Australia is the first recorded example of interaction between the inhabitants of the Australian continent and their Asian neighbours.
  This contact had a major effect on local Aboriginal Australians.  The Makassans exchanged goods such as cloth, tobacco, knives, rice, and alcohol for the right to trepang coastal waters and employ local labour.  Makassar pidgin became a lingua franca along the north coast among several indigenous Australian groups who were brought into greater contact with each other by the seafaring Makassan culture.
  These traders from the southwest corner of Sulawesi also introduced the word balanda for white people, long before western explorers set foot on the coasts of northern Australia. In Arnhem Land, the word  is still widely used today to refer to white Australians. The Dutch started settling in Sulawesi Island in the early 17th century.
  Archeological remains of Makassar contact, including trepang processing plants (drying, smoking) from the 18th and 19th centuries, are still found at Australian locations such as Port Essington and Groote Eylandt. The Makassans also planted tamarind trees (native to Madagascar and East Africa). After processing, the sea cucumbers were traded by the Makassans to Southern China.
  In 2014, an 18th-century Chinese coin was found in the remote area of Wessel Islands off the coast on a beach on Elcho Island during a historical expedition. The coin was found near previously known Macassan trepanger fishing sites where several other Dutch coins have been discovered nearby, but never a Chinese coin. The coin was probably made in Beijing around 1735.
caption: A Macassan wooden sailboat or prau of the type trepangers have used for centuries
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