Displays to celebrate Dirk Hartog's arrival
Last month it was 400 years ago that Dirk Hartog arrived at an island west of Shark Bay, Western Australia, and left the famous pewter plate there with an inscription of who he and his crew were and what the ship Eendracht (Concord) was doing there.
It was the first European writing ever left on this continent.
The Dutch and Australians are commemorating this event this year.
The Dutch Royal couple were here a fortnight ago to add lustre to the event.
A concert was held in the Opera House where two talented young Dutch pianists played with the Sydney Symphony orchestra to a full house including various Australian dignitaries.
That pewter plate was found 81 years later by another Dutch seafarer and explorer, Willem de Vlamingh, who took it with him and left his own pewter plate there.
He delivered it in Amsterdam where it is usually kept in the Rijks Museum.
The Vlaming's plate was found in 1801 by the French Admiral Hamelin who decided to leave it there contrary to the wishes of a senior officer Louis de Freycinet.
De Freycinet came back with his own ship 17 years later, collected the plate and had it delivered it to museum authorities in Paris.
It was lost there for quite a while but was rediscovered after World War II and the French Government then decided to donate it to the Australian Government who placed it in the Shipwreck Museum in Fremantle.
Dirk Hartog's original plate is also in Fremantle right now, on loan, from the Rijks Museum.
The Dutch had mapped around 70 per cent of the Australian coastline by 1644, after Abel Tasman's second journey.
That was quite some time before James Cook arrived in Botany Bay in 1770 and then proceeded to map the East Coast.
However, the Dutch were particularly interested in the spice trade from the Indies and found nothing of the kind in the Great South Land long known as New Holland until at least 1802 when Matthew Flinders renamed it Australia.
The exhibition of mostly Dutch maps of that period will start on December 9 in the foyer of the Erina Fair's Gosford Library Branch.
Email, 24 Nov 2016
Klaas Woldring, Pearl Beach