Taking another crack at this based on feedback from other members. Map forthcoming.
1627 AD: A freak storm drives Francois Thjissen's ship The Golden Seahorse north, damaging it and leaving it to limp to OTL's Perth. There, abundant wood would make repairs easy, and Captain Thjiessen is given permission by the VOC official on the ship, Pieter Nuyts, to explore up the river he names the Nuyts River (OTL: Swan River) into the interior.
Francois Thjissen returns with reports of seeing people on the waters' edge, of strange animals...and of sandalwood. The aromatic wood of this tree was a highly-sought commodity in China and India, and the VOC had already been trading it. This discovery would quickly see the VOC establish a colony in Australia.
1629 AD: The ship Batavia lands at the mouth of the Nuyts River to establish a colony before sailing north. Cornelisz Janzsoon had sought out a position as governor, outwardly promising to loyally serve the VOC, though his later behavior showed that Janszoon seemed to have ambitions to run his own little kingdom in Australia.
Whatever his motivations, Janzsoon would provide the VOC with the sandalwood it wanted. He would establish a colony with a few dozen Dutch soldiers overseeing over one hundred slaves from Africa and Asia, sent to find and dig up whole trees near the Swan River and its tributaries, to be carried or boated back to the mouth of the colony to be cut up and then exported for sale in China and India.
This profitable trade would see speedbumps, of course. The people that Thjissen had glimpsed, the Whajuk tribe of the Noongar nation, would react with hostility to the intruders. They ambushed soldiers and slaves alike to kill them with spears, and looted the VOC’s camps for tools and food. In the forested lands of the southwest, many slaves saw the opportunity to escape and went maroon as soon as they could, disappearing from the reach of Janzsoon and his men.
1630 AD: In light of the governor of Dutch Timor deserting his post the previous year, the VOC makes the decision to abandon Timor and send the colonists there to the Nuyts River colony. Along with their arrival, they bring livestock from Indonesia including Java ponies, specifically requested by Janzsoon to use to hunt down maroon slaves and deter Aborigine raiders. The Nuyts RIver colony starts turning a tidy profit for the VOC as sandalwood is shipped out in increasingly large amounts.
1642 AD: Abel Tasman visits the Nuyts river colony before his trip to the Pacific, bringing herds of sheep and cattle from the Cape to replace livestock lost to raiders per requests made by Janszoon. At the colony he notes that multiple Aborigine women live among the Dutch, some sold as slaves to the Europeans after being captured by rival tribes, and some 'junior wives' in polygamous marriages hired out as labor by their husbands. The initial raids conducted by the Whadjuk had resulted in them becoming entranced by the use and prestige that could be gained from obtaining European goods, and the tribe had established peaceful contact with the Dutch interlopers in the hope of gaining more.
Tasman notes that Janzsoon seems to be in a polygamous relationship with several of the Aborigine women, and that mixed-race children now live in the colony.
1648 AD: The Dutch West India Company, having recently gained some cash infusion from investors made wealthy by the VOC’s sandalwood trade, is able to muster the resources to fight off the Portuguese attacks on their holdings in Central Africa and Brazil. In the ensuing peace negotiations, they keep a small part of Recife in Brazil to use as a factory for the slave trade. In Central Africa they keep a stronger position, maintaining most control over trade but tolerating a Portuguese presence, much to the consternation of their Congolese allies who come to the crucial realization that the Dutch could not be fully trusted, and would need to be played off against the Portuguese (credit to
@cmakk1012 for inspiring this butterfly).
By keeping a foot on both ends of the Atlantic Trade, the West India Company gained a financial lifeline thanks to the profit they made from the brutal exploitation of slaves captured by their African allies and also earned the nickname “salt dicks”, the idea being that with one foot on each end of the Atlantic their penises dipped into the ocean (IIRC IOTL this is an Afrikaaner insult aimed at British South Africans).
1652 AD: The Dutch attempt to retake Timor, but in their absence the Portuguese freebooters had dug in tightly, living mostly in the interior from which they could strike at any Dutch settlement and disappear, and keeping their few coastal settlements heavily fortified. The VOC is not able to dislodge them, and is ordered to give up the fight so as not to endanger the Dutch factory at Recife. Peace finally reigns between the Portuguese and the Dutch, emboldening the Portuguese in Timor to try their luck at expanding.
1653 AD: The labor of digging up and returning sandalwood starts to be taken over by “Zwaan Coloreds”. Named for the black swans of Australia, these mixed-race children of the colony were more reliable than the slave labor that constantly went maroon and had to be recaptured, and were willing to work for basic supplies such as iron tools.
Using kinship networks with their maternal uncles and cousins in the Whadjuk and other tribes,, the Zwaan Coloreds hired guides to navigate to sandalwood in the interior and in exchange passed on to the their Aborigine relatives livestock, iron tools, and knowledge-it is believed to be through these networks that the Noongar learned animal husbandry and riding.
In the north, Portuguese Dominican friars from Timor found a monastery in Arnhem Land, creating a base from which to search for sandalwood. These searches fail to find anything of value in the interior, but the Timorese find that Arnhem land is good trepanging land. The Monastery has some success growing bananas and other foods, and by trading foods and goods to the Aborigines manages to make some nominal converts.
1655 AD: The Dutch West Indian Company’s attempt to re-establish a colony in Valdivia from which to prey on Spanish treasure fleets meets with failure after conflict with both the Spanish and the Mapuche. Pulling back, though, the company notes that there is a possibility for another colony which could provide a base from which to launch pirate attacks on the Spanish: the Malvinas Islands, on which the retreating WIC ships resupplied. Further exploration would be necessary to determine if the colony would be worth establishing there.
1661 AD: The Nuyt River colony receives a surprising visitor: the Dutch mathematician Arend Roggeveen (Father of OTL’s explorer Jacob Roggeveen). Sailing from the Malvinas, he had gone into the Pacific to find the Great Southern Continent and whatever wealth it contained, and find a route through which China could be easily reached without running afoul of either the Spanish or the VOC. Roggeveen had found neither-the route he took was long and difficult, with a ship wrecked off a reef in Samoa and no sighting of gold or sandalwood on any islands he enountered-though perhaps he did not look hard enough.
Janszoon sees Arend as a threat to both his power and a challenge to the VOC, and orders Arend executed, and his sailors enslaved. Word does get out to the governor of Batavia about this state of affairs. He orders the prisoners released, their enslavement a step too far even for the VOC, and eventually decides to recall Janzsoon-creating a shock that Janzsoon does not recover from.
1663 AD: Janzsoon dies. Having run the colony like his own little feifdom, it would come into some disorder after his death, with his wives and some of his children leaving the colony and driving herds of sheep, horses and cows before them as a long overdue dowry. Many of the remaining slaves would go maroon, joining small established communities of maroons living in the bush among the Aborigines.
The new governor would re-establish the sandalwood trade, leaning ever more heavily on the Zwaan coloreds to bring back the precious wood. Janzsoon may have been unscrupulous and amoral even by the VOC’s standards, but he had been quite efficient at getting the easy-to-reach sandalwood. Now, the Zwaan coloreds would need to range further and further afield to gain this product. Getting access to it would require appeasing ever more distant tribes like the Yamadtji and the Kalamaia. These people were eager to get access to horses and metal for themselves and so were willing to guide the Zwaan Coloreds to sandalwood groves for the right price. Obtaining horses and metal would allow them to fight Noongar raiders and give them some respite from the changes that Dutch colonialism was wrecking in western Australia.
1670 AD: Feral populations of water buffalo and swine explode in the north, as Dominican monks attempt to teach farming to Aborigine converts but instead see their livestock 'learn wildness' from the native peoples.
Aboriginal conversion to agriculture is a little more successful in the southwestern Dutch lands, as some of the Zwaan Coloreds and Noongar living among the Nuyts River colony start farming in the European style, assimilating to the European way of life.
1689 AD: Smallpox is introduced to Dutch Australia from Batavia, devastating the Noongar nation whose numbers were already dropping due to tuberculosis, syphilis, and a growing slave trade ferrying women and children to the Nuyts River colony.
Many Noongar survivors would come to live among the colony, adding to the number of Zwaan coloreds, but others-especially those who had adopted marooned slaves into their ranks-would flee into the land that would never be called the Avon wheatbelt and adopted a changed lifestyle. They brought livestock, sheep they herded and cared for using knowledge learned from the Dutch and maroons, and horses they rode as their Zwaan Colored cousins had taught them. They would come to dominate the wheatbelt, trading, raiding and fighting with the tribes to the north and east. From one of these tribes, the Kalamaia, the new people would be given the name history knows them by-Mudija.
With sandalwood near the Nuyts River colony depleted, the Mudija would become the VOC’s main supplier of this product, in addition to selling Aborigine women and children as slaves to the European and Zwaan Colored farmers of the Dutch colony.
Just as the Mudija had been transformed by contact with European lifestyles, the Zwaan Coloreds and Noongar who came to live at the Nuyts River colony would add their own twists to the European lifestyle they were adopting, bringing bush tucker to add to the farms on the river bank. Although initially grown mostly as a medicinal plant, bloodroot can be made into a spicy powder. This spice proved to be a small but valuable addition to the spice trade for the VOC, adding to the profitability of the colony (credit to
@metalinvader665 for the idea).
1699 AD: The English Privateer William Dampier lands at the Nuyts River Colony to resupply. He notes that a “native pepperroot” is grown by the few farmers of the colony, and writes that riders from beyond the colony came to visit it while he stayed there, dragging with them a sandalwood tree to be processed and sold. Significantly, he notes that one of the riders wore an emu feathered headdress.
This is the first written evidence of the growth of the Horse Corroboree, a religious practice of the Mudija which would spread to other Aborigine tribes. Generally a men’s ceremony (though women had their own concurrent ceremony where they ritually painted foals to make them grow fast and strong), this ritual saw older men pass on oral tales of riding prowess, knowledge of how to break and ride horses, and the secret prayers through which a horse could be taught to bring wealth to its rider. The ceremony can only be led by an Emu Hat Man, a hunter who has earned the right to wear an emu feather headdress by spearing a running emu while at full gallop. It was probably the earliest priests of this tradition that William Dampier witnessed, displaying their supernatural power to their comrades as they sought the wealth provided by the Dutch through the sandalwood trade.
1702 AD: Under orders of a new governor sent to re-establish Portuguese authority over Timor, Aborigine converts in Arnhem land are given muskets with which to hunt feral water buffalo and export their hides. This turns into a thriving trade, with the converts also taking the opportunity to settle some old scores with their tribal enemies, killing them or capturing them to sell to the Portuguese.
Timorese deer would be introduced to the north within a few years to add to the hide trade. The Dominicans of Arnhem land kept some horses and had some converts who knew how to ride, and with their usefulness for the hunt a steady stream of horses would be imported to the north in exchange for hide and deer horn, establishing a northern horse culture which mirrored the Horse Corroboree culture of the southwest.
1714 AD: A second introduction of smallpox from the Cape kills many of the younger Noongar; this second outbreak would be the beginning of the end of the Noongar tribes in the temperate southwest. Having seen their traditional religion fail to protect their children, many would abandon their homelands with some going to join the Zwaan Coloreds and seeking solace in the churches of the Nuyts River colony, while the many otherswould flee to the savannas of the interior to join the Mudija. This influx of people would allow the Mudija to recover very rapidly from the epidemic. Although they were now certainly the largest and most powerful of the Aborigine peoples though, they were not unchallenged.
At this point the Horse Corroboree had spread into the scrublands south of OTL’s Great Sandy Desert and west of the Victorian Desert and Nullarbor Plain and with it the knowledge of horse riding. The other Aborigine tribes who practiced the Horse Corroboree such as the Yamatji and the Kalamaia kept a hunter-gatherer lifestyle rather than adopting a pastoral one, even as they bred horses themselves. This allowed them to live with a lighter ecological footprint-which among other things, meant that groves of sandalwood were more likely to regrow in the land they controlled. Using new long spears to hunt emu and kangaroo from horseback, these tribes were producing their own warriors who could ride and fight the Mudija, deterring slave raids, and they could force the Mudija to negotiate before harvesting sandalwood to sell to the Dutch, gaining European goods and metal tools. As a religious practice, the Horse Corroboree seemed to work, for the horse did indeed bring wealth to its riders just as the ceremony promised the faithful.
1722 AD: Jacob Roggeveen follows in his father’s footsteps, seeking the legendary Terra Australis. Where his father had sailed west to east, Jacob secured funding from the VOC to sail east to west, to explore the land that Abel Tasman had called “New Zealand” to see if it was the legendary southern continent his father had sought.
He circumnavigates the North Island of New Zealand, proving that it is not the fabled Great Southern Continent. Although he did not find any easily exploitable resources in this land, his descriptions of New Zealand and Australia would be published in Europe and greatly interest the European imagination. The Aborigine imagination was less intrigued by this strange white man who appeared and disappeared. The Maori imagination was somewhat piqued by this man who appeared, circled Te Ika-a-Maui, and then vanished. To this day, their oral history credits Roggeveen with introducing the “Goblin kumara”, or potato, to their land, and Roggeveen’s journals do indicate that he left gardens of potatoes and other plants as a precursor to colonial projects which would never be realized.
1725 AD: European interest in the Terra Australis grows as the Nuyts River colony begins to sell produce into the Indian Ocean, providing grain and meat to French Mauritius and to the ships of the British East India Company.
With the Mudija hegemony shielding the colony from raiders and bloodroot becoming a more common commodity in the Netherlands, the colony would start to attract more Dutch settlers interested in farming the Australian southwest. Difficulty in securing labor for farms and the challenges that poor and saline soils poised to European farmers in Australia limited settlement, but several hundred Dutch “Burghers” would flock to the colony at this time. These settlers, along with “Austraalier Malays” and Zwaan Coloreds would form the core of VOC Australia, extending the VOC’s dominion to the forested land southwest of OTL’s Avon wheatbelt.
1727 AD: This seems like a good point to take the butterfly net off for random events, right? Let’s start with Anna Petrovna surviving childbirth in 1728. A nice, positive butterfly.
1730 AD: The Antipodes Company is incorporated in London to explore and exploit eastern Australia. Initial expeditions launched to this land do not find much-no gold, no sandalwood on the coasts or even up the Murray River, and no spices. Just black men with spears who did not seem to grasp that as indigenous people they had no right to the land they lived on, and who rudely speared the initial English explorers.
However, after 1732, the Antipodes company is able to snatch up whaling ships from the South Seas company on the cheap after the latter’s attempts to whale in Greenland prove unprofitable. Sending these ships to “Van Dieman’s Land” (OTL’s Tasmania) turns a profit for the company between whale blubber and sealing, and the English quickly establish themselves in southeastern Australia.
1735 AD: French explorer Pierre Bouger visits eastern Australia, making astronomical observations and gathering intelligence for the French government. Like William Dampier before him he makes notes of the Aboriginal peoples, but he sees no evidence of horses or horseback riding in the southeast. After his visit, French ships would join the Antipodes company in whaling and sealing in the east. Looking to head off the competition, the Antipodes company orders its captains to attack French ships, provoking international tensions.
1740 AD: The French officially join the Guerra del Asiento, then being fought between Britain and Spain, on the Spanish side. Officially their Causus Belli was piracy committed by English ships on French ones in Australia.
Combined, France and Spain’s navy was quite formidable and the British believed that they could and would invade Great Britain, and so put the bulk of their forces into guarding the English channel. This was not a bad guess, but it turned out to be a tactical mistake as the Spanish government persuaded the French to take the fight to the British in the New World.
The French would avoid challenging the English in the channel itself and instead ferried troops and supplies to New France and Spanish Florida.
1742 AD: The French put their plan into action in North America, attacking the British from New France and assisting the Spanish with an invasion of Georgia through Florida.
The Florida campaign is not a success, as the French and Spanish soldiers tried to use European tactics in a frontier setting, and many of the French troops were unseasoned and unable to fight due to malaria. The French/Spanish forces in Georgia are easily driven back into Florida by a ragtag colonial militia.
The northern campaign is more successful, as allied Indians and French colonists provide guidance and assistance to French troops, helping them successfully drive the British out of Nova Scotia and Acadia. With the War of the Austrian Succession in full swing at this point, the French are not able to send reinforcements to follow up on this success or to invade New England, and with the aid of their Iroquois allies the British rally and hold off French incursions.
1744 AD: The French government, having already committed ships to the Americas to fight alongside Spain in the Guerra del Asiento, decides not to attempt a naval invasion of Great Britain. This is to the great chagrin of many in the French military, who saw this as a missed opportunity which quite clearly would have been a great military success for France. The lesson they learned in the Guerra del Asiento was to bring the war to the British in their homeland as quickly as possible next time.
1748 AD: The end of the War of Austrian Succession returns most of Europe to the status quo antebellum, with Prussia and France’s political goals unrealized. However, having entered into war against Britain early and alongside Spain due to events in Australia, France had now secured the Acadian peninsula (OTL’s Nova Scotia) and much of Acadia, putting New France in a more defensible position from the British. With no losses to their American holdings, the French keep control of the European factories seized in Madras since they had no reason to trade them away.
The French victory over the British was by no means decisive. To have the British accept peace terms the French officially ceded any claim they might have to “the lands beyond Dutch Beach [a term the French and British used for Dutch Australia, taken from Marco Polo’s legendary island of Beach], essentially granting the British Antipodes Company a monopoly on southeastern Australia.
1750 AD: OTL’s Townsville area in Queensland sees the introduction of metal tools such as axes, brought to the continent hundreds of miles away by the Portuguese in Arnhem land. These axes had been traded over the Great Dividing range by mounted aborigines hailing from the Gulf of Carpenteria where horseback riding had now been established as a way of life, a way to seize slaves and the main way to hunt.
Despite being drawn into the economy of the northern horse culture, the natives of the Townsville region do not adopt horses, which were less useful in the more forested east coast-insofar as they interacted with mounted Aborigines, they used dense forest cover and networks of ditches to trip up slave raiders on horseback.
Staving off this forceful introduction of a horse culture, the coastal Aborigines established their peaceful trade. They manufactured long spears (three times as long as traditional spears) used for hunting on horseback and collected ironwood bark for the creation of shields and saddles for the mounted peoples of the interior. In exchange, they gained leather goods, horseflesh jerkey, and metal tools from Arnhem land, bringing them into the Portuguese economy of Northern Australia despite the fact that they would never see a Portuguese.
1751 AD: The Dutch-Noongar war breaks out as free Dutch farmers spread out from the Nuyts River colony, coming into conflict with Noongar peoples who remained unassimilated.
1754 AD: The Washington War breaks out in North America, so named for a young British militia leader who was captured and executed by the French after trying to lead an attack into the Ohio territory. This war would fold in with the 7 Years’ War.
1756 AD: The Dutch-Noongar war ends with the Dutch successful in expelling the few remaining free Noongar from the forested southwest, or enslaving them. In the savannas of OTL’s Avon Wheatbelt, though, the Dutch fail to bring the Mudija to heel. The sandalwood and slave trade had seen the Mudija acquire guns to match the firepower brought in by the Burghers. In addition, the horsemanship the Mudija practiced was unmatched by the Dutch, and allowed them to launch devastating guerilla attacks on Dutch farmsteads.
The Dutch Burghers would not be able to count on the support of the VOC for two reasons. The Burghers trekking east practiced ranching, while the VOC wanted its farmers to grow bloodroot and stay tied to more controllable farming land. Secondly the VOC did not want to endanger the sandalwood trade-even though sandalwood was now very rare in the west, its rarity was making it more valuable.
Facing lack of support from colonial authorities and a determined Mudija resistance, the Burghers were forced to accept that the Mudija who they saw as “the bastard son of slave and a savage” was master of the savannas, and that the Austraaliers would have to remain under the thumb of the VOC in the southwest.
1763 AD: The 7 Years’ War ends with the “Crushing of Prussia”. Tsar Peter III, a ‘gentle soul’ under the influence of his mother who had raised him for most of his life, had handed over execution of the war to Russia’s generals on the death of his aunt Elizabeth-and they had brought down proud Prussia, decisively ending the 7 Years’ War.
Prussia’s ally France had not fared much better, having tried to refight the Guerra del Asiento by invading Britain by sea. This plan saw their fleet crushed at Dover and supremacy given over to Britain on the high seas. Unable to supply their colonies, they had lost the Ohio territory to Britain. In India, the end of the war saw their Bengal allies grant favorable trade terms to the British East india Company.
Unsatisfied by this war, the French would launch some new colonization projects which would, in turn, prompt the British to continue working to expand their Empire.
1764 AD: The French send thousands of settlers to New France, Acadia, Louisiana, and Guyana. The thousands of settlers in Guyana are mostly killed very quickly by tropical disease.
In New France, hundreds of settlers are killed by the Haudenosaunee as they settle on their land. This provides the impetus for the “harrowing of the Iroquois”. The French and their Huron allies ethnically cleanse the Iroquois, burning fields of maize and razing entire villages. The Iroquois would seek refuge with the British, who granted them land south of the Finger Lakes. These Iroquois in turn would volunteer to serve as scouts for the British in the Ohio territory, preserving their claims to land in the Finger Lakes by opening up land to the West for British settlement-and therefore driving many of the Shawnee and Lenape north to seek refuge in New France.
1764 would see the beginning of the British colonial project in Australia, with settlers brought to sealing outposts in Van Dieman’s Land.
1774 AD: British colonists discover gold in Van Dieman’s Land. This torpedoes any hope of peaceful coexistence with the natives of the land, who are subject to massacres and attacks by a flood of gold prospectors. Many were taken into custody by the British authorities under the pretext of humanitarian concern. But driven by greed, the British end up selling many of the Aborigines under their ‘protection’ to the Austraaliers, where they are assimilated into the Zwaan Colored population.
