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Pete: Some of the interesting stuff you’ll learn about, if you look up some of the early explorers like James Cook and, you know, Matthew Flinders, they have to obviously have a good grip of weather systems and how all the winds work. And that was why we called them the Trade Winds, right?
Ian: Yes. Yes.
Pete: Going from… Was that from America to Europe?
Ian: Yeah. Yeah.
Pete: But, apart from… like, that obviously has nothing to do with Australia but the… We have names don’t we, for the 30s, 40s, and 50s in latitude?
Ian: Yeah. Yeah.
Pete: I think, I know The Roaring Forties.
Ian: The Roaring Forties is called that because it has the strongest winds.
Pete: Yep.
Ian: …overall on average it will have the strongest winds. So almost all of Australia is above 40 degrees latitude. There’s a little bit of Tasmania that’s slightly below it, but… So, if you wanted to get to Australia from Cape Town in South Africa, notionally, the easiest thing to do would just be to follow a latitude, which would be catching the winds…
Pete: Yep.
Ian: …but you’d be following a latitude in the 30s, 30 degrees south, and the winds aren’t as strong. So, it made more sense to travel further south.
Pete: Yep.
Ian: And then… And that was, you know, hundreds of years ago. And then navigators worked out that travelling on the great circles around the globe was faster than travelling the latitudes, because it makes more sense. If you… It’s hard, this is hard to talk about…
Pete: Yeah. Without diagrams?
Ian: Let alone to show you in two dimensions. But if you get a sphere, you can… you can draw a shorter line going closer to the pole than you can by following a line of latitude.
Pete: Well, that said, if you were to draw lines around a tennis ball or whatever…
Ian: Yeah.
Pete: …like as circles, the smaller circles are at either pole of the tennis ball.
Ian: Yeah. You’re also going to for moving from one place to another one. You can move closer to the poles.
Pete: Yep.
Ian: Like, if you’re flying from North America to Europe. You go over almost, and we do go into the Arctic Circle, and almost over the North Pole is the shorter line.
Pete: Yep.
Ian: Rather than looking on a two-dimensional map and drawing in a straight line.
Pete: And going in a straight… Yeah. It’s weird, isn’t it?
Ian: When you map that back on to a globe, it’s not the straightest line.
Pete: Well, that’s why you’ll tend to see flights being mapped out12 and they’re always arcs, right?
Ian: Yeah.
Pete: They don’t tend to be dead straight lines…
Ian: No. No. They’re not.
Pete: …unless they’re between two very close locations.
Ian: They’re not. Because they’re following the shortest… Other than in very busy areas, then they… they’re separating them, you know, just for air traffic control. But, typically, they’ll follow the shortest distance, not the one that looks like a straight line on a two-dimensional map.
Pete: You know more about this than me, but is that how Van Diemen’s Land was found originally?
Ian: Yep.
Pete: So, Van Diemen’s Land is what Tasmania used to be called when it was found by…
Ian: Abel Tasman.
Pete: Abel Tasman.
Ian: After16 whom it is now named.
Pete: Which is…
Ian: But he named it after his sponsor, if you like, Van Diemen. Yeah, he basically bumped into it.
Pete: Yeah. Because he’d gone and he was trying to cut across, cut through that latitude, right?
Ian: Yeah. Yeah. And that was before the rest of mainland Australia… other than a few European sailors and probably lots of Asian sailors that we haven’t read their records, if they ever kept them…
Pete: Yep.
Ian: …landed on the west coast and the north coast of Australia. But the south coast and the east coast really hadn’t had… had no Europeans landing on20 it until Tasman landed in Tasmania. And then he went on to New Zealand.
Pete: Did he do that in the early 1700s? Late 1600s?
Ian: Late 1600s, off the top of my head21.
Pete: Yeah, it’s crazy when you realise that Australia was bumped into… I think it was 16… Early 1610s, right? By… was that…
Ian: Dirk Hartog?
Pete: Yeah, Dirk Hartog.
Ian: And then William Dampier. And there’s another one. I’m ashamed to say I can’t remember his name, who hit the north coast as well.
Pete: So, those guys that came… Those guys were Dutch. They were Dutch, right?
Ian: Dampier was English. Well, he actually wasn’t but by the time he had landed here he was a citizen22 of England. And Dirk Hartog was Dutch.
Pete: Yeah.
Ian: And the English and the Dutch had huge trade routes going to what we now call Indonesia, called the East Indies at the time. And because they were getting spices. They were called them Spice Islands. So, they were getting spices and taking them back to Europe. And they… This obviously is way before the Suez Canal, so they would come around the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa, and they found it easier because of the roaring 40s winds to sail south, catch the roaring 40s, and then go north up the coast of Australia.
Pete: Yep.
Ian: And so, a few people, they knew about that west coast of Australia for a long time, but nobody ever landed on it because from the sea, it just looks like cliffs and sand dunes. That doesn’t look anything worth going and stopping.
Pete: Well… Yeah. It’s funny, isn’t it, because you would imagine that if the coasts had been reversed in Australia, because the east coast is, as I’m sure the listeners are aware, it is incredibly lush and green because of the Great Dividing Range.
Ian: And that’s where all the population is.
Pete: Yeah. And that’s where the population is. But if they’d been reversed, Australia probably would have been colonised and populated 100, 200 years earlier.
Ian: Oh, yeah. Much earlier. And it probably would have been the Dutch.
Pete: Yeah, exactly. And so… It’s funny too, when you grow up and you learn about this stuff at school, you’re kind of, “Oh, yeah, the Dutch and the French and the English were just around this area,” but you don’t really know much about why. So, what were they doing in this area? What were the companies they were involved in and where were they based?
Ian: Well, there are companies in India to start with. The East India Company, and which was… basically, ran what we would currently call India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. The majority of those states in those countries were run by the East India Company.
Pete: Yep.
Ian: It wasn’t the British government that were running it. It was a huge company. And they were a trade company. They were running trade out of the rest of South Asia and Southeast Asia back to Europe, taking, you know, products mostly out of Southeast Asia were spices. As I said that pepper was worth more than gold.
Pete: There were a few of those sorts of stories, right, at that time. Tulips34 or something was worth more than gold too, in Holland, for a long time. And they had a… Everyone was going crazy trying to buy them, and then the prices plummeted, right. Everyone lost their fortune on tulips.
Ian: Yes. Because they actually have no real value other than aesthetics36.
Pete: Yep. Yep. So, yeah, there were obviously… they had the East India Company, which was England, and the Dutch had the Dutch…
Ian: And the Dutch… I can’t remember the name of the company. Yeah, it’s something…
Pete: It was The Dutch East India Company or something like that where they’re in the… They were in the same area, right? In Indonesia, though.
Ian: And the French were in what we now call Vietnam.
Pete: Yeah. As well as Vanuatu and everything like that. Those islands.
Ian: Yeah. Some of those small islands in Melanesia and Polynesia because they are out in the Pacific as well. Places like Tahiti and New Caledonia were originally French colonies.
Pete: Yeah. Which again, you sort of take it for granted that those places, yeah, they speak French there.
Ian: Yes. They do.
Pete: Of course, yeah, that’s what they speak. You know, we learn that growing up but you don’t remember… Well, you do remember; you don’t know why until you know more about colonisation.
Ian: Yeah. And look, some of the places in the islands north of Australia and New Guinea were colonised by the Germans much later than the Dutch and the English and the French and the Spanish and the Portuguese were around. But they got… So, some of those islands have German names.
Pete: No kidding?
Ian: You know, they don’t speak German, but they have German names.
Pete: Yeah, it’s really funny how different the world would be had colonisation not taken place with obviously the racial makeup of countries like Australia and not to mention, you know, how the lands changed and everything, but also the languages and dialects that have been spread around the world, chiefly from Spanish, French…
Ian: Yep.
Pete: I guess, Dutch to a lesser extent, though, they kind of got out of a lot of their colonies earlier, right?
Ian: They did. Yes.
Pete: Right. But one of the interesting things I found out when I was learning a bit of, Bahasa Indonesian, which is their sort of Mandarin Chinese, right? It’s the language they created…
Ian: It’s the generic language that Malaysia and Indonesia made…
Pete: Yeah, for them to communicate ‘cause there are so many hundreds of languages. That has a lot of Dutch in it because of that company that was there…
Ian: Yeah. It does.
Pete: …which blew my mind at the time.
