Wellbeing - Dutch shipwrecks and the marooned sailors on the WA Coast by Dr Nonja Peter
About this event
We are in for a real treat for this talk.
Here is a synopsis to entice our members and friends.
Title: From the Eendracht to the Leeuwin: Dutch Maritime Connections with Western Australia from 1616 to circa 1650
While 2029 marks 200 years since a British colony was established in Western Australia, it is also 400 years since the VOC ship Batavia was wrecked on the Abrolhos Islands. Dutch connections with Australia, however, stretch back much further. From the first recorded Dutch sighting of Australia in 1606, the Dutch have had maritime, military, migration and mercantile connections with Australia—and, since Dirk Hartog’s landing on the Western Australian coast in 1616, with WA in particular.
In this talk, I explore the activities of the Dutch Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC, or Dutch East India Company) in the Indian Ocean during the Netherlands’ Golden Age, and how Western Australia first became part of this much larger story. I examine the four Dutch VOC shipwrecks along the WA coast, Batavia (1629), Gilt Dragon (1656), Zuytdorp (1712) & Zeewijk (1727) and consider the intriguing possibility of interaction and cohabitation between shipwreck survivors and Aboriginal peoples.
I also take you behind the scenes of historical research: how can we trace information of the ships and sometimes people who sailed them across four centuries? This includes my research into the Leeuwin (1622) and the discovery of its skipper in 2022. These voyages reveal not only what the Dutch encountered along the Western Australian coast, but also why, despite their early discoveries, Dutch maritime exploration and contact with the WA coastline eventually ceased.
Nonja Peters (PhD UWA) is an anthropologist, historian and curator specialising in transnational migration, migrant heritage and the social and cultural histories of postwar migration. She was Founding Director of the Migration Experiences Research Centre (MERC) at Curtin University and has pioneered research, digital preservation and public humanities initiatives documenting migrant histories and experiences. She is currently Adjunct Professor at Edith Cowan University’s SAGE Futures Lab and Adjunct Research Fellow at the John Curtin Institute of Public Policy, Curtin University.
