The Dirk Hartog Island post site: Early European Encounters with Australia and the Establishment of a Maritime Cultural Landscape

Abstract

Christer Westerdahl's conceptual frameworks for identifying and understanding maritime cultural landscapes have spread far beyond their original European roots and found a place in the works of many other archaeologists worldwide, including in Australia. This paper looks at the first encounters between European mariners and the Australian landscape, focusing on a single site on Dirk Hartog Island, on the western Australian coast. From the early 17th century Dirk Hartog Island became one of the few fixed and known points on the largely unmapped Australian coastline. Over a period of several hundred years its northern tip was repeatedly visited by a succession of Dutch, French and English explorers, sometimes accidentally but usually intentionally, replicating each other's movements up the cliffs to stand on the rocky headlands overlooking Shark Bay. More importantly, each group left behind a physical testament to their presence, alternately removing, repairing or adding to the monuments left by those who preceded them. This paper examines these encounters and this site in terms of some of the themes suggested by Westerdahl's work, including territoriality and pilgrimage among explorers as a maritime community.