Beaufort, Anne. College Writing and Beyond: A New Framework for University Writing Instruction

Australia began with a bad press. Four hundred years ago, the gossip around the Indies was that the Dutch East India Company's little workhorse vessel, Duyfken, looking to see what lay beyond the riches of the islands where the spices grew, had coasted along southern New Guinea and what we now know as the western shore of Cape York Peninsula, but the Company's servants had found 'no good to be done there.' Hopes of a reputed 'great store of Gold' had been disappointed and 'in sending their men on shoare to intreate of Trade, there were nine of them killed by the Heathens, which are man-eaters.' We hear later that at least one of these deaths was on the Australian coast. (1a) In 2006 it was proper that we commemorated the four-hundredth anniversary of the 'discovery' by Janszoon and Roossengin on the Duyfken of Australia and its people. (2) In my view, there is neither convincing record nor likelihood of earlier deliberate long distance contact by others, though no doubt there has been a steady light 'rain' of castaways from close at hand through the millennia from first settlement. 'Discovery', though, is not my theme in this paper. (3) It is enough to observe that by the 1650s most of the Australian coast was charted reliably enough for the navigational standards of the day.