http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/inquirer/bush-tucker-man-les-hiddins-great-dutch-adventure/news-story/b122ba9491e73aa7d4d2f8e0c8866b9bBush Tucker Man Les Hiddins’ great Dutch adventure
Les Hiddens' expedition to uncover evidence of early Dutch settlement in Australia
The Australian
12:00AM July 16, 2016
Les Hiddins is back in the rugged bush and red dirt of central Australia, walking in the footsteps of some of the country’s earliest explorers, stopping to turn over rocks and desert shrubs, gunning his Land Rover across riverbeds, talking local history with Aboriginal landholders and comparing notes with a handful of scientists.
The Bush Tucker Man, 69, in battered RM Williams boots, khaki shorts and shirt, and worn Akubra sombrero, is knee-deep in the latest chapter of his most ambitious expedition yet.
Hiddins is stepping up a painstaking search for what would be, if it exists, 300-year-old evidence — a fragment of human bone or a European-style tombstone or an artefact from a vessel, Concordia — to prove a theory of which he says he is “99.9 per cent certain”, yet one he knows sounds improbable: that Dutch survivors of Concordia’sshipwreck off northwestern Australia walked to land near the Palmer River in the Northern Territory, 62 years before Captain James Cook landed at Botany Bay, and built a settlement that lasted generations.
He has been thinking about it for two decades. He has spent large sums of his own money along the way, since a Queensland Museum maritime archeologist, Peter Gesner, first showed him a story about a purported Dutch colony published in an 1834 edition of English newspaper The Leeds Mercury. Others who have looked into the story believe it was a hoax.
But Hiddins, who made a couple of episodes about it when The Bush Tucker Man was still a staple of ABC television, is more adamant than ever that a Dutch colony existed.
Today, after more than 20 trips to the Northern Territory, helicopter charters for aerial surveys over remote target areas, hundreds of hours spent investigating historical and genealogical records in The Netherlands, Sydney’s Mitchell Library, London’s Public Records Office, and the private collections of descendants of British public servants and Australian explorers, Hiddins believes he has found the place, a few hundred kilometres south of Alice Springs.
He is, he admits around the camp fire, inescapably and romantically gripped by the story. We are not far from the Middleton Ponds ruins of the homestead of another legendary bushman, Bob Buck, who in 1931 recovered the bones and diary of Harold Lasseter after his ill-fated expedition during the Depression to “rediscover” a vast reef of gold that almost certainly never existed.
History has written off Lasseter as a fantasist who invented the story of gold in Australia’s desolate heart; Hiddins, in stark contrast, is a widely admired truth-seeker and bushman determined to prove a British officer wrote honestly of a Dutch colony in central Australia.
“What we have to do is sharpen our pencils and use DNA and ground-penetrating radar to see what’s covered up by the sands,’’ says Hiddins under a stunningly starry night sky as temperatures drop towards the low of minus 4C.
He and his wife Sandy have towed a campervan from their home at Kuranda, on the plateau above Cairns, to this site at Tempe Downs. Hiddins is confident it is near the campsite, over the rolling hills and the Palmer River, that Dutch survivors from the 1708 shipwreck of Concordia settled. Hiddins knows it sounds implausible — such a walk would have been extraordinarily challenging; official British records are silent on any such colony; conclusive traces of any Dutch settling there have not been found — but he isn’t giving up.
“This of course paints a totally new picture for us from an Australian history point of view,’’ Hiddins says. “To the sceptics, I say they need to get a life. It’s easy to be a sceptic and to just ask the questions. It’s much harder to find answers and that’s what we’re doing here. I was sceptical myself at first. I put The Leeds Mercury article in the drawer and did nothing about it for the first couple of years. When I pulled it out again, I started to find things that lined up and it began to fall into place.
“I’ve been listening and reading and thinking about this an awful lot over the last couple of decades, I’m pretty much convinced that it did happen, you just have to find the DNA. We’ve just got to find that evidence. With the help we have got these days with scientific stuff and that sort of thing, I think we can do that.”
It is a project that also has been good for the former Australian Army major, helping the straight-talking Vietnam war veteran, who has established retreats for other veterans, overcome personal challenges.
“I think that anyone involved in the sharp end of warfare does not come away unscathed; if you’re there in the firing line, it does affect you, and the risk is that you’ll take prescription drugs and curl up in the corner. That’s not me. This project has kept me pedalling.”
Hiddins with his trademark hat and Land Rover in the freezing cold of a desert night under the stars, at his remote camp near Sandy Bore. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen
Which is why, in the cold light of dawn on Tempe Downs, the Hiddinses are setting out again from the makeshift campsite with a forensic scientist and bone analysis specialist, Dayman Steptoe, and his wife Yoshimi. Joining them are two drone-operating remote-sensing scientists from James Cook University, Karen Joyce and Susannah Leahy, and two Northern Territory archeologists who help examine the terrain.
“It’s an open-ended question and a hard one to answer — will he find something — but to me and a generation and a half of people who used to sit glued to the TV for The Bush Tucker Man, Les is one of the genuine legends of Australia and the bush,’’ says Steptoe.
“There is something fascinating about the way he has been researching the history of the last couple of hundred years with a very different idea of what has happened. We know there were plenty of Dutch boats kicking around the west coast of Australia before British settlement, and Les has answers to a lot of the tough questions about how and why survivors would walk this far inland. So far, it’s a circumstantial case and the most powerful thing driving it is his spirit — he really believes there was definitely a Dutch colony here. I regard Les as one of the more genuine people to have talked about and explored the Australian bush. He just might find something.”
The catalyst for all of it is the perplexing January 25, 1834, edition of a newspaper that has been long defunct. On that day, The Leeds Mercury published an extract that, it reported, came from the private journal of a British officer, Lieutenant Nixon, who described how his exploring party had discovered, in 1832, a white colony living in an oasis-like area in Australia’s interior.
Hiddins has studied the extract so often he knows every word of its vivid account of trudging for many weeks over “nothing but barren hills and rocks and sands and parching plains” until there was a “magical change of scenery” — plantations, straight rows of trees, a broad sheet of water and small boats gliding along narrow channels as fish were netted. The writer described, on reaching this nirvana, that he had “naturally expected to meet an Indian as black or as brown as the rest of the natives, and not a white man in these unexplored regions”, yet he “came suddenly upon a human being whose face was so fair and dress so white that I was for a moment staggered with terror, and thought I was looking at an apparition”.
According to the extract, the equally surprised inhabitant spoke Dutch, badly, and went on to explain that he “belonged to a small community, all as white as himself, he said about 300; that they lived in houses enclosed all together within a great wall to defend them from black men; that their fathers came there about 170 years ago, as they said from a distant land across the great sea; and that their ship broke, and 80 men and 10 of their sisters with many things were saved on shore”.
One of the descendants, he said, was named van Baerle. The story describes them as having travelled on foot, after the shipwreck, “toward the rising sun, carrying with them as much of their stores as they could during which many died”.
They eventually made settlement and survived on maize and yams, fish and kangaroo.
Hiddins accepts that if the 1834 account in The Leeds Mercury was a work of fiction, he and a few others have been enthusiastically barking up the wrong tree. But he is confident his own extensive research in his 200-page carefully referenced document, called The Possible Dutch Colony located in Central Australia: 1708-1832, is circumstantially corroborative.
He became hooked on learning that a passenger, Constantijn van Baerle, was on Concordia’s manifest when the ship foundered in 1708, 126 years before The Leeds Mercury article put a van Baerle in the purported Dutch colony.
Hiddins does not believe that obvious discrepancies — such as 170 years of Dutch settlement, as reported in The Leeds Mercury, and the fact 124 years elapsed from when Concordiawent down in 1708 to the date of the purported discovery — are significant. He suggests it could be the result of an old-fashioned typo or innocent mistake. The sceptics say this sounds like reshaping the facts to fit the story.
Hiddins uses map pins for each new discovery he makes over the years of his searching. He decided the author of the purported journal was almost certainly Ensign Robert Dale, not Nixon, and that the use of a false name was a deliberate decoy.
Hiddins believes there are suspicious gaps in official British records that would have shed light on the expedition’s discovery; that a white missionary with the Hermannsburg Mission, near the presumed settlement site, noted in the 1870s that Aboriginal women had “names such as Judith, Paula, Mirjam, before they ever saw a white man”; and that, intriguingly, a white man’s well to draw water was built before the British came.
The map pins used by Hiddins formed a cluster around an area known to be inhabited by a tribe called the Luritja — a name, he says, meaning “foreigner”. Another clue he cites was the discovery in the Mitchell Library of an old document with lightly pencilled co-ordinates for the Dutch colony.
It was tucked inside a book, The Friend of Australia, by TJ Maslen. The book was the personal copy of Maslen, a retired lieutenant of the Honourable East India Company. Maslen, according to Hiddins, sent Dale’s journal extract to The Leeds Mercury, but under a nom de plume to ensure Dale would not be disciplined for revealing an official secret.
“In the original Leeds Mercury article in 1834, it told how this colony had set itself up over many generations,’’ says Hiddins, atop a hill overlooking flat bare ground he believes was one of the plantation sites for the colony. Overhead, a drone methodically surveys the site for unusual features as Steptoe looks for European burial sites.
“In fact, I get the feeling that it was going downhill as far as an existence is concerned because he says (in the article) that they had no livestock or animals of any kind but they did grow crops nearby. And his last sentence is very interesting because he says ‘they may be considered a new race of beings’. And by that I guess he’s saying ‘hey, they’re no longer pure white people, they’re no longer Aboriginal, but a blend of the mix between the two’. And that’s, I think, pretty much what would happen, a blend between the two.”
Initially, Hiddins believed a walk inland from Western Australia to central Australia by a group of shipwreck survivors “would be near on impossible — after all, the water and all that sort of thing would be a great problem”. He says his doubts were eased when he was assured by scientists in Townsville that drill-core analysis showed “about three times greater than our normal rainfall” occurred in 1708-09.
It would be easy, Hiddins says, “to dismiss the Leeds Mercury article as some sort of antipodean Gulliver’s Travels, and Maslen as a typical travellers’ tales author”, but he will not countenance it. On the idea that a large group of shipwreck survivors could walk almost 2000km across inhospitable terrain, Hiddins, who helped write the Australian Army’s military survival manual, says it would be “clearly daunting … but not insurmountable”.
Survival is a fierce motivator and previous generations were more resilient, he says. The survivors would have walked eastwards, he suggests, when the coastline yielded little food. He believes that when they reached the Palmer River, Dutch ingenuity for manipulating water with dykes and small dams ensured a permanent water supply.
When Hiddins zeroed in on the Palmer River location, he drove out and spoke to Sidney Moloney, an indigenous holder of the land whose mother was born in the river bed. Moloney and his children admire Hiddins, always watched Bush Tucker Man, and want Hiddins’s Dutch colony story to be true. But they have obvious questions.
“Why? How? Why would they want to do it? When did they do it? Why did they pick this particular site down here?’’ Moloney tells The Weekend Australian at White Horse Gap on Tempe Downs.
“You got to have evidence. If they can find some evidence somewhere that sort of links all this story together, then maybe we start thinking, ‘Well, maybe they could be on the right track.’
“Growing up, I think it was in the late 80s, early 90s, his show was on and I remember watching it all the time, it was like a religion — there was millions of people, I reckon, in Australia that used to watch it all the time because they were interesting shows and it related a lot to what we know down here now in our country like witchetty grubs and bush tomatoes and bush bananas, and all that sort of stuff.
“He’s seeking information (here) all the time and looking about and hopefully one day it will all come to fruition.”
By the end of the week, the camp is being packed up. With rain threatening, Hiddins, Steptoe, James Cook University’s two scientists, and the Territory government’s two archeologists are ready to leave. They will take away nothing tangible. The Bush Tucker Man, however, is fired with enthusiasm and already making plans for the next stage — contact with descendants of van Baerle in Europe to compare their DNA with that of a sample volunteered by Moloney.
“I don’t count this as my last great adventure, I’m not dying tomorrow and I don’t intend to,’’ says Hiddins. “I’ve got other things coming down the track. But this is certainly a very significant milestone in my life.”
