Monsoon Traders (Macassans)
Approximately 100 years before European settlement (1788), the northern shores of Australia were visited by Monsoon traders from the eastern part of (modern day) Indonesia. These trader fishermen, collectively known today as Macassans (after Campbell Macknight’s pioneering work), sailed from the Indonesian port of Makassar on the island of Sulawesi, to the northern shores of north Australia in search of marine products for the Chinese market.
Leaving Makassar with the northwest monsoon in December each year, these trader fishermen (their crews of Makassan, Bugis, Butonese, Timorese, Malukans and Papuan origin) sailed to the Northern Territory coast and to the Kimberley coast of Western Australia. The Arnhem Land coast was known to the Macassans as Marege and the Kimberley coast as Kayu Jawa.
Camps were established in sheltered bays from which marine products such as trepang (a holothurian), turtle-shell (from the hawks-bill), pearls and timber were collected. Using the south-easterly trade winds (east monsoon) in March or April they returned to Makassar where the products were used locally or on-shipped to markets in China. In its heyday during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Macassan trepang industry involved 1000 men and 50 vessels annually.
During their annual voyages to Australia the Macassans generally had amicable relationships with the Indigenous people they encountered, exchanging goods in return for labour and access to places to set up their trepang processing camps. These camps involved prefabricated smoke houses, huts and cooking sites to boil and smoke the trepang. Some intermarried and a few Aboriginal people went back to Makassar to live. <image of trepang camp>
During the latter part of the nineteenth century there were several attempts by Europeans to enter the industry, but these failed largely due to a lack of knowledge in processing and marketing of trepang. By the turn of the century Macassan trade became increasing regulated and restricted by Australian authorities. Relationships between the Macassans and Aboriginals came under investigation, fuelling the federal government’s resolve to take control of the northern fisheries. By 1906, the Macassan trade was terminated by the South Australian Government who administered the Northern Territory at the time, reflecting the creeping distrust that many post-Federation white Australia policy makers felt towards its northern neighbours.
A hundred years later, the legacy of this centuries old contact lives on, particularly in the artistic and ceremonial practices of the Yolngu from central and northeast Arnhem Land. Indigenous peoples continued interest in this cultural interchange has led to a number of reciprocal visits between Yolngu and Makassan/Bugis people from Sulawesi. These recent visits (beginning in 1986) have enabled people to discover and meet relatives and relive old memories of the trepang days. For many Aboriginal people this rediscovery, which has also involved ceremonial exchange, has been viewed as a reaffirmation of significant aspects of their cultural heritage.
Today all Macassan sites are protected as archaeological sites under the Heritage Conservation Act 1991.
