There are early records of Timorese traders sometimes visiting NW Australia. However, finding an area unsuitable for agriculture and producing no useful or interesting goods may well have led Chinese or Southeast Asian traders and explorers to discount such a discovery.
Why was Australia not discovered by the Chinese first? People have been discovering Australia for tens of thousands of years, starting with the waves of migration that followed the Toba eruption 70,000 years ago. Fossil evidence does not show that any humans or pre-humans discovered Australia before that.
But there's evidence that Captain Cook was really three centuries too late. You see in the 1420s Australia's west and east coasts were visited and charted by the Chinese. In fact in a great surge of navigation and discovery the Chinese mapped much of the world in the 1420s.
It was a largely inhospitable land that could only sustain a small population of aborigines. The valuable gold and minerals deep within the continent were yet to be discovered. There was nothing in Australia to attract them — in particular, nowhere to grow their crops.
The history of Chinese Australians possibly predates the arrival of James Cook in the eighteenth century. Chinese Australians are the oldest continuous immigrant group to Australia after those from the British Isles.
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.
The Chinese were not always welcome in Australia and were constantly reminded of their allegedly inferior status. The most commonly cited acts of discrimination and prejudice against the Chinese in Australia were the Lambing Flat riots of 1860 and 1861.
Australia is made up of many different and distinct Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander groups, each with their own culture, language, beliefs and practices. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are the first peoples of Australia, meaning they were here for thousands of years prior to colonisation.
It is true that there has been, historically, a small number of claims that there were people in Australia before Australian Aborigines, but these claims have all been refuted and are no longer widely debated. The overwhelming weight of evidence supports the idea that Aboriginal people were the first Australians.
First, it's hard to say whether, given time, China would have discovered the New World. We do know that after 1433, discovery stopped because the incentive structure as established by government policy did not encourage investment in overseas exploration. It was not only discour- aged, it was forbidden.
In 2002, retired submarine commander Gavin Menzies presented a lecture in which he claimed a Chinese fleet under Admiral Zheng He began a series of voyages in 1421 that would ultimately discover the North American continent.
Menzies claims that Zheng He visited America in 1421, 71 years before Columbus arrived there.
By IANS: It was Christopher Columbus who discovered America but new evidence suggests the Chinese were exploring America at least a thousand years before Christ. Recently discovered ancient scripts suggest Chinese explorers may have discovered America long before the Europeans arrived there, Daily Mail reported.
Australia is China's sixth largest trading partner; it is China's fifth biggest supplier of imports and its tenth biggest customer for exports. Twenty-five per cent of Australia's manufactured imports come from China; 13% of its exports are thermal coal to China. A two-way investment relationship is also developing.
China is Australia's largest trading partner. It buys almost a third of all Australian exports, and is the top overseas market for many Australian goods and services. Trade and investment with China is a big part of Australia's future. The Australia-China economic relationship is extensive and growing strongly.
The Australia-China bilateral relationship is based on strong economic and trade complementarities and longstanding community and cultural links.
Australia is home to the oldest continuing living culture in the entire world. The richness and diversity of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures in Australia is something we should all take pride in as a nation.
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.
Aboriginal Australians have lived in the Northern Territory for more than 65,000 years. It is the oldest continuous culture on earth.
Australia's first people—known as Aboriginal Australians—have lived on the continent for over 50,000 years. Today, there are 250 distinct language groups spread throughout Australia.
In the 1860s, Victoria became the first state to pass laws authorising Aboriginal children to be removed from their parents. Similar policies were later adopted by other states and territories – and by the federal government when it was established in the 1900s.
Based on the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) projections, the number of Indigenous Australians in 2021 was estimated to be 881,600. The Indigenous Australian population is projected to reach about 1.1 million people by 2031 (ABS 2019b).
Upon establishing a colony, and developing agriculture, there was an increasing demand for labour in the early Sydney Town. A large number of indentured labourers were then brought from Fujian province in China to work as shepherds and irrigation experts for private landowners and the Australian Agricultural Company.
The majority of Chinese immigrants to Australia during the gold rush were indentured or contract labourers. However, many made the voyage under the credit-ticket system managed by brokers and emigration agents.
Chinese immigrants first flocked to the United States in the 1850s, eager to escape the economic chaos in China and to try their luck at the California gold rush. When the Gold Rush ended, Chinese Americans were considered cheap labor.