Groundbreaking archaeological research has confirmed scientifically what Indigenous peoples already knew, that first Australians were making huge overseas voyages to trade in a vast international network at least three millennia earlier than previously thought.
“Our elders passed knowledge down through generations for us, teaching us how the old people were living back in the day, way before Captain Cook ever came,” McLean says. About 3500 years ago the Lapita people, who colonised the western Pacific, came down from northern Vietnam or southern China or Taiwan and moved south to the Bismark Archipelago north of New Guinea and migrated eastwards to the Solomon Islands, Fiji, New Caledonia and Vanuatu.Archaeologist Sean Ulm is the deputy director at the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage.
“The team published that work for the first time in 2011 and it was met in the academic community with a lot of critique that it couldn’t possibly be Lapita, because Lapita people didn’t go westward along the southern New Guinea coast, they only went east ,” Ulm says. He says it appears pottery was traded into Torres Strait from New Guinea 3000 years ago, and some was produced locally. Finding a connection between the Lapita and Torres Strait, once they were known to have moved westwards across New Guinea, was not entirely unexpected, he says. But what came next on Lizard Island was a bolt from the blue.
Professor Ulm, of James Cook University, explained the pottery shards are smoking gun evidence that overturn the idea of Australia’s ancient isolation. The groundbreaking pottery archaeology and evidence of ancient trading networks is showcased in a new exhibition, developed in partnership with the Walmbaar Aboriginal Corporation and Hope Vale Congress Aboriginal Corporation.is at the Museum of Tropical Queensland in Townsville. It will move to Brisbane in June.