Both Aboriginal oral histories and the archaeological record shows the Chinese drove Australia's first global trade in the Asia-Pacific well before the first fleet's arrival. Oral histories tell of direct contact between Chinese and Yolngu people.
Trade and transformation
The fishermen arrived each December and camped along the Arnhem Land coast, catching, boiling and drying trepang. They met, traded and worked with local Aboriginal people. The months that the Makasar spent harvesting in the coastal waters of northern Australia were busy ones.
It's long been thought that Indigenous interactions with Europeans officially began after white settlement. But the Yolngu people of the Northern Territory say they were trading with Indonesians for hundreds of years before that.
Items that were traded included kangaroo skin, pearl shells used for decoration, and stone and timber to make axes and spears used in hunting. Ochre, a mineral, was one particularly important and valuable material that was traded regularly between clan groups.
The fishing camps opened up international trade decades before the British settled the continent: an exchange of boats, seafood and women that connected Indigenous Australians with Asia.
Trade / Art / Music
Aboriginal group exchanged natural resources, such as ochres, and tools, such as stone axes and boomerangs, thus creating extensive trading networks. Goods travelled hundreds of kilometres from their original source.
First Nations people gathered furs and brought them to posts to trade for textiles, tools, guns, and other goods. This exchange of goods for other items is called the barter system. Each party would bargain to try to get the best value for the thing they were trading.
Whilst there were caravans of camels and horses loaded with silks and spices and maps to guide the traders in Europe and Asia, the Aboriginal people developed a thriving bartering and exchange system by using their sacred pathways and songlines to guide them in their trade exchanges.
Trade was a central part of life for Aboriginal people prior to the British settlement of Australia. Trading routes criss-crossed the nation, dispersing goods, information, technologies and culture thousands of kilometres away from their origins. The extent of trade was vast.
China remained Australia's largest trading partner in 2021–22, accounting for 27% of our two-way trade. Japan and Korea account for a further 18%.
Following the failure of the Gove lands rights case, the Whitlam Labor Government instigated an inquiry into Aboriginal land rights (known as the Woodward Commission), which eventually led to the Fraser Liberal government passing the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976.
The first known landing in Australia by Europeans was in 1606 by Dutch navigator Willem Janszoon on Australia's northern coast. Later that year, Spanish explorer Luís Vaz de Torres sailed through, and navigated, what is now called Torres Strait and associated islands.
In a book titled 1421: The Year China Discovered the World Gavin Menzies claims that in the 1420's several fleets of Chinese ships sailed around the world, making contact with many countries before Europeans explored them, including Australia.
Before 1912. Although Chinese traders were reportedly present in Australia from the 1750s, bilateral trade was small scale until the 20th century.
In early 2020, Prime Minister Scott Morrison endorsed an inquiry into the origins of COVID-19, which angered China. Following this, China started posing import tariffs on some Australian exports. According to analysts, these sanctions were a retaliation for the endorsement.
Aboriginal origins
Humans are thought to have migrated to Northern Australia from Asia using primitive boats. A current theory holds that those early migrants themselves came out of Africa about 70,000 years ago, which would make Aboriginal Australians the oldest population of humans living outside Africa.
Prehistory. It is generally held that Australian Aboriginal peoples originally came from Asia via insular Southeast Asia (now Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, East Timor, Indonesia, and the Philippines) and have been in Australia for at least 45,000–50,000 years.
In many of the contemporary accounts it is clear that Indigenous Australians were participating in the economy; selling food and clothing to the miners and providing information about tracks and water sources. They were also finding gold independently and using it to trade.
The trade relationship changed the lives of Indigenous peoples in both positive and negative ways. At least at first, Indigenous people were able to control the trade, because it depended on their trapping. But the fur trade made some Indigenous peoples dependent on European goods.
The fur trade started because of a fashion craze in Europe during the 17th century. Europeans wanted to wear felt hats made of beaver fur. The most important players in the early fur trade were Indigenous peoples and the French. The French gave European goods to Indigenous people in exchange for beaver pelts.
Deer hides were an important commodity in the prehistoric Southeast and quickly became the main commodity in the trade between the numerous Native American tribes and the French, British, Spanish, and later the American powers that vied for control of the areas east of the Mississippi River.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples' rights and interests in land are formally recognised over around 50 per cent of Australia's land mass. Connection to land is of central importance to First Nations Australians.
In December 1976 the federal parliament passed the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act. It was the first legislation in Australia that enabled First Nations peoples to claim land rights for Country where traditional ownership could be proven.
The study provides good evidence that Aboriginal Australians are descendents of the earliest modern explorers, leaving Africa around 24,000 years before their Asian and European counterparts.