Putting Australia On The Map

Dutch navigators had accurately charted some two-thirds of the Australian coastline in the 170 years before Captain Cook’s arrival in 1770.

- Nick Burningham

It’s well known that Dutch mariners visited Australia long before Cook charted the east coast in 1770 for Great Britain.

However, the myth persists that early Dutch knowledge of Australia – which has been home to Aboriginal Australians for tens of thousands of years – was merely the result of clumsy navigation, with Dutch ships accidentally blundering onto the west coast while en route to Indonesia. That certainly wasn’t the case. Indeed, European exploration of Australia began with a deliberate voyage by Duyfken, a small Dutch ship captained by Willem Janszoon.

In 1606 Janszoon and his crew made the first authenticated European sightings of Australia when they reached the western coast of Cape York Peninsula, in far north Queensland. In the decades that followed, more than 40 Dutch ships sailed to Australia’s shores, with their navigators accurately charting much of Australia’s northern, western and southern coastlines, including parts of Tasmania. The legacy of these explorers remains with us today in place names such as the Swan River, the Gulf of Carpentaria, Dirk Hartog Island, and Cape Leeuwin.

Duyfken was a small, relatively fast armed ship known as a “jacht” – the term “jacht” comes from the Dutch verb “jagen”, meaning to hunt. (During the 17th century, the Dutch invented what we now call yachting-using vessels known as “spiel-jachten” (play-jachts), from which the term yacht is derived.) Duyfken was tasked by the Dutch East India Company, or Vereenigde Oostidische Compagnie (VOC), to explore what lay beyond the Spice Islands of eastern Indonesia.