h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

New Zealand is named after Zeeland, a province in the Netherlands. The Australian island of Tasmania is named after Dutch explorer Abel Tasman.

Why did were the Dutch the first Europeans to discover Australasia? And why did they decide to sail away and leave the place untouched?

Why, in short, do they sing Watzing Matilda instead of Het walsen Stijntje?

*Risks *

Unlike the Portuguese who hugged the African/Asian coast to get to the East Indies, the Dutch discovered it was quicker if they dropped down into the Roaring Forties and then turned north before hitting Australia.

They occasionally failed to avoid the north-west coast of Australia so they had some knowledge of it. The problem was that part is inhospitable desert for the most part, with lots of dangerous offshore reefs and islands and no decent, safe natural harbours.

There were also a few curious cases of mutiny in that area by Dutch crews, including one case that resulted in some of the mutineers becoming the first permanent European inhabitants of Australia, that made the Dutch somewhat reluctant to go there.

No Iago.

It's close enough to close the whole thing down.

All I would add is that the Dutch avoided the coast-hugging route in order to avoid the Portuguese. They were more than happy to face the Portuguese in open battle, or to pay pirates to attack them, but individual trading ships could travel more safely by crossing the open ocean.

The north-west coast of Australia is indeed forbidding, but Tasman went south and east. The simple truth is that they couldn't see the point of Australia: it had no spices, the aborigines and Mauris had nothing worth trading.

Thanks for the mutiny stories. Extra points for that!

One of the most notious mutinies was led by a man named Cornelisz in the 1620s. The ship ran aground, and led to a very 'Lord of the Flies' scenario. Cornelisz was eventually hanged on Seals' Island, and you can still see his body hanging there 400-odd years later.

That's OK. That's what you're supposed to do.

"notious"? Notorious!

Notious sounds like a good word to me, KB. It just needs a definition - like the place names in The Meaning of Liff.

By the way, the long sea voyage is the reason for the introduction of Dutch farmers into the Cape of Good Hope, because the sailors couldn't pull ashore to find food. When the Dutch East India Company went bankrupt the farmers (boers) were left behind, with subsequent cost to future generations.

Now the way that I heard it, the Dutch were traders, and didn't colonise Australia because the Aborigines had nothing to trade. Unlike the Brits and later the French, Germans, Italians and Belgians, the Dutch weren't interested in colonies as places to get rid of undesirables like fundamentalists, unreliable scions of the aristocracy and criminals. Obviously the Boers were a self-selecting exception to this.

Their modus operandi was to was to use tobacco to create an addiction and thereby rapidly establish a trading market, and buy whatever the country had to sell. Australia, unlike most other places at the time had no exportable goods, and the Aborigines were hard to get hooked on nicotine because they were nomadic and entirely un-urban.

According to this theory, the Dutch didn't colonise Australia because they couldn't be bothered. There wasn't anything in it for them.

The Brits on the other hand used their colonies to export white trash of various sorts, and poorer Brits saw the colonies as an opportunity for a new start, so the most common British model was permanent migration, as in America, Africa and Australia. The model in India, where the Brits went out, did a tour of duty lasting anything between 2 and 40 years, and came back again, was a different model. But both these models was different from the Dutch one which was, as I said, basically trading, using tobacco as the hook to create the market.

B

Tasmania wasn't called Tasmania originally, it was Van Diemens' Land. It was named that by Abel Tasman. It was only later under British rule that it was changed to Tasmania - I think it was VDL for a much longer period than it's been Tasmania.

RF

Given the constant problem of keeping the Netherlands afloat, so to speak, it's surprising that settlement somewhere more favourable wasn't a temptation for them, Ben.

> Given the constant problem of keeping the Netherlands afloat, so to speak, it's surprising that settlement somewhere more favourable wasn't a temptation for them, Ben.

Mmmm. You'd have thought, wouldn't you? Nowt so strange as folk.

> Given the constant problem of keeping the Netherlands afloat, so to speak, it's surprising that settlement somewhere more favourable wasn't a temptation for them, Ben.

I think the reason may have been that the Dutch East India Company was a self-governing corporation in a not very united country. By the time the British East India Company started to mutate into the British Empire, they were heading towards bankruptcy.

They controlled what is now Indonesia, though, and established coffee plantations in Java. And they didn't want to give Indonesia up. When the British gave independence to India and the Indonesians wanted the same thing, it took American pressure to stop them fighting for it to the bitter end.

>>>Van Diemens' Land

As in the song "The girl with the black velvet band"

TRiG.

Thanks, TRiG, I didn't know that one.

This one went quickly, but generated a lot of interesting discussion

QI - Low Countries Down Under

QI (+6)

HonestIago (pirate stories)
King Bomba (Cornelisz)
Ben (for the tobacco addiction theory)
Reddyfreddy (for Van Diemens' Land)
TRiG (Relevance of the girl with the black velvet band)

Klaxons (-5)
None awarded

Correct. (+3)
HonestIago

Elf (+1)

InfiniteImp