Social history since colonisation
First contacts | Explorers | Buffalo hunting | Missionaries | Miners | Pastoralists
First contacts
The first non-Aboriginal people to visit and have sustained contact with Aboriginal people in northern Australia were peoples of the Indonesian archipelago. They travelled to northern Australia every wet season to harvest trepang (sea cucumber), and collected turtle shell, pearls, pearl shell, timber and buffalo horn for Asian markets (Press et al. 1995). Evidence of their contact have been found among the artefacts found in archaeological digs in the Park in the form of glass and metal fragments from that period.
The British attempted a number of settlements on the northern Australian coast in the early part of the nineteenth century: Fort Dundas on Melville Island in 1824; Fort Wellington at Raffles Bay in 1829; and Victoria Settlement (Port Essington) on the Coburg Peninsula in 1839. These settlements were all subsequently abandoned for a variety of reasons, such as lack of water and fresh food, sickness and isolation.
As in other parts of Australia, the exposure to new diseases had a devastating impact on the local Aboriginal population. It is estimated that the area between the Adelaide and East Alligator Rivers supported an Aboriginal population of 2000 in pre-European times. There are now only about 500 Aboriginal people living in Kakadu.