Most of the explorers of this period concluded that the apparent lack of water and fertile soil made the region unsuitable for colonisation.
In the early 19th century a few Netherlands-born convicts were transported to Australia. A small number of free settlers also immigrated, and the gold rushes drew increasing numbers to Victoria from the 1850s. By 1911, 186 Netherlands-born people lived in Victoria.
Seeking riches in the great 'Southland'
The Dutch were looking for anything that could make them a profit, not just back home but also between ports in Asia. They also needed bases where they could refresh their supplies and workforce from Europe, across the Indian Ocean, to Batavia (modern-day Jakarta).
While Indigenous Australians have inhabited the continent for tens of thousands of years, and traded with nearby islanders, the first documented landing on Australia by a European was in 1606. The Dutch explorer Willem Janszoon landed on the western side of Cape York Peninsula and charted about 300 km of coastline.
Violence broke out and Janszoon lost nine of the 20 crew that had arrived there on the Dufyken. The Wik-Mungkan oral histories, that have been passed through generations, have similarly told of the violence which ensued after the Dutch arrival in Australia in 1606.
After Dutch navigators charted the northern, western and southern coasts of Australia during the 17th Century this newly found continent became known as 'New Holland'.
“They provided stunning proof that Portuguese ships made these daring voyages of discovery in the early 1520s, just a few years after they had sailed north of Australia to reach the Spice Islands -- the Moluccas. This was a century before the Dutch and 250 years before Captain Cook,” he said.
Although many Dutch expeditions visited the coast during the 200 years after the first Dutch visit in 1606, there was no lasting attempt at establishment of a permanent settlement.
Dutch sailors were among the first Europeans to reach Australia. In fact, most of Australia's coastline was first charted by Dutch mariners. In the post-WWII period, the Netherlands government actively encouraged immigration to help ease housing shortages in the country.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are the first peoples of Australia, meaning they were here for thousands of years prior to colonisation.
The Dutch charted the whole of the western and northern coastlines and named the island continent "New Holland" during the 17th century, but made no attempt at settlement.
The islands were settled by different seafaring Melanesian cultures such as the Torres Strait Islanders over 2500 years ago, and cultural interactions continued via this route with the Aboriginal people of northeast Australia.
At the 2021 census, 381,946 people nominated Dutch ancestry (whether alone or in combination with another ancestry), representing 1.5% of the Australian population.
Unlike the Spanish and English, the French and Dutch fostered good relationships with Native Americans. The French in particular created alliances with the Hurons and Algonquians. Both the Dutch and the French relied on marriages with Native Americans to expand their fur trading operations.
This included Belgians who had moved first to the Netherlands, then to the Americas. The first 31 families arrived in the harbor of the North River in 1623 aboard the “New Netherland,” and by 1624, the colony of “New Amsterdam” began to be formed.
' Between 1606 and 1756 there were four known Dutch voyages in which a total of eight ships sailed along the North Queensland coast and made contact with the Aborigines. These encounters with the Aborigines were frequent and often resulted in violent conflict.
Interestingly, the carriage was given to Queen Wilhelmina more than 35 years after The Netherlands abolished slavery in 1863, yet it depicts black people only as slaves and not as full citizens of the country's colonies.
In 1863 slavery was abolished in all Dutch colonies. The emphasis in the historiography has been on the Dutch participation in the transatlantic slave trade. In total, Dutch slave traders shipped around 600,000 enslaved Africans to the New World, which is 5–6 percent of the total of the transatlantic slave trade.
There is no one Aboriginal word that all Aborigines use for Australia; however, today they call Australia, ""Australia"" because that is what it is called today. There are more than 250 aboriginal tribes in Australia. Most of them didn't have a word for ""Australia""; they just named places around them.
New Netherland was the first Dutch colony in North America. It extended from Albany, New York, in the north to Delaware in the south and encompassed parts of what are now the states of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Connecticut, and Delaware.
Like other European maritime nations, the Dutch were quick to involve themselves in the transtlantic slave trade. Between 1596 and 1829, the Dutch transported about half a million Africans across the Atlantic. Large numbers were taken to the small islands of Curaçao and St. Eustatius, in the Caribbean.
Until the early 19th century, Australia was best known as New Holland, a name first applied by the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman in 1644 (as Nieuw-Holland ) and subsequently anglicised.
The name Australia was specifically applied to the continent for the first time in 1794, with the botanists George Shaw and Sir James Smith writing of "the vast island, or rather continent, of Australia, Australasia or New Holland" in their 1793 Zoology and Botany of New Holland, and James Wilson including it on a 1799 ...
This name is very close to the modern Chinese name for Australia which is “Aodaliya” (澳大利亚) for the large island and “Ao Zhou” (澳洲) for the continent.
Australian English can be described as a new dialect that developed as a result of contact between people who spoke different, mutually intelligible, varieties of English. The very early form of Australian English would have been first spoken by the children of the colonists born into the early colony in Sydney.