Makassan contact with Australia

Makassan trepangers from the southwest corner of Sulawesi, Indonesia visited the coast of northern Australia "from at least the eighteenth century" to collect and process trepang (also known as sea cucumber), a marine invertebrate prized for its culinary and medicinal values in Chinese markets. The term Makassan (or Macassan) is generally used to apply to all the trepangers who came to Australia, although some were from other islands in the Indonesian Archipelago, including Timor, Rote and Aru.

The creature and the food product are commonly known as sea cucumber, bêche-de-mer in French, trepang (or trīpang) in Indonesian, gamat in Malaysian.

Trepang live on the sea floor and are exposed at low tide. Fishing was traditionally done by hand, spearing, diving or dredging. The catch was placed in boiling water before being dried and smoked, to preserve the trepang for the journey back to Makassar and other South East Asian markets. Trepang is still valued by Chinese communities for its jelly-like texture, its flavour-enhancing properties, and as a stimulant and aphrodisiac.Matthew Flinders made a contemporary record of how trepang was processed when he met Pobasso, a chief of a Makassan fleet in February 1803.

Fishing fleets began to visit the northern coasts of Australia from Makassar in southern Sulawesi, Indonesia from about 1720, but possibly earlier. While Campbell Macknight's classic study of the Makassan trepang industry accepts the start of the industry as about 1720, with the earliest recorded trepang voyage made in 1751, Regina Ganter of Griffith University notes a Sulawesi historian who suggests a commencement date for the industry of about 1640. Ganter also notes that for some anthropologists, the extensive impact of the trepang industry on the Yolngu people suggests a longer period of contact. Arnhem land rock art, recorded by archaeologists in 2008, appears to provide further evidence of Makassan contact in the mid-1600s. Contact has even been proposed from as early as the 1500s.

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