Waiting at the domestic terminal at Cairns Airport recently for a flight back to Melbourne, I noticed a destination flash up on the departures board: Groote Eylandt. It’s a strange name for place in Australia — I even have no idea how the locals pronounce it. But it’s immediately obvious that it’s a form of Dutch, although not using particularly modern spelling, meaning “large island”. In order to demonstrate how large it is, Groote Eylandt is about the same size as the province of Groningen, or the Australian Capital Territory.
A few things have got me thinking lately about Australia’s past. Firstly, a post from Nick Bryant, the BBC correspondent in Sydney, about the strength of British culture in Australia. I was recently in England and everything (apart from the money) felt incredibly familiar, despite it being only my second trip through UK immigration.
Secondly, the history I was taught in secondary school was pretty shabby. We began with the First Fleet and continued through the 1800s, focussing on the gold rush. We were taught very little about the indigenous peoples and pretty much nothing prior to 1788, although I was aware that the Dutch had done some exploring. I read Gary Crew’s Strange Objects a long, long time ago, but the story of the Batavia had completely slipped my mind until I visited the replica in Lelystad last year. Some of the survivors of the shipwrecked Batavia reached the mainland and met the indigenous peoples, long before the British did.
Thirdly, the history of Dutch Brazil got me thinking how it would have been different if the Dutch had managed to keep control there. Given that the Dutch skirted around the northern and western coasts of Australia in the 1600s (leading to place names such as Groote Eylandt that are still used today) but never settled, what would have been different if Australia had remained New Holland?
I’m an engineer, not an historian nor a writer of alternative history, so I haven’t come up with anything radical. Nick Bryant mentions a lot of influence on media and sport. The influence from England has led to cricket, netball and rugby being popular sports in Australia. Hockey also originated in England, and is one of the few sports I can think of in which both the Netherlands and Australia are strong. Maybe korfball would have become more popular than netball.
If the Dutch had stayed for any length of time, I guess a form of Dutch would have become the standard language in Australia. Possibly another language could have triumphed, but it’s reasonable to expect that it would contain a lot of Dutch loanwords, as can be seen in Indonesian. There is a large amount of British programming on Australian TV, which helps with keeping the British influence alive, especially with respect to language. Possibly the New Holland public broadcaster schedules would be filled with Dutch programmes.
An interesting thought though is seeing as Australia is quite large, the Dutch could have settled in the north and the west, and the British could still have settled in the east. We could have ended up with a split situation, with two official languages/European cultures etc. alongside the cultures of the indigenous peoples. Who knows what that would have led to. In any case, it’s quite funny that Abel Tasman determined that Groote Eylandt was exactly that, when he was just 50km from a much bigger island.
