except Scrabble here.![]()
No, I was saying that I of all people would understand what a messy, civil war'd CF the ARW was.
Points for picking up on where I got my name from, though.
except Scrabble here.![]()
No, I was saying that I of all people would understand what a messy, civil war'd CF the ARW was.
Points for picking up on where I got my name from, though.
Out of curiosity, are their any other "anomalies"? Just curious.I personally have driven through a gen-u-ine Australian historical anomaly dozens of times, so think YellowDingo's claims may not be overly bizzare. Near my parent's place there is a swamp where Aboriginies settled down and lived in stone and thatch huts to 'work' an improved wetland and smoke meat of later consumption. The settlers drained the swamp and wrecked the huts, so that 100 years later no serious trace remains.
Matthew Flinders encountered a Maccasan 'fleet' in 1803, so it doesn't strike me as too bizzare that the crews of such a fleet could have constructed a Mosque at some time bewtween 1400 and 1803 for seasonal use.
Out of curiosity, are their any other "anomalies"? Just curious.
Chinese shipwrecks, allegedly. And I'm sure that's only the start. The idea of a 'virgin' Australia asleep through the millennia waiting for True Love's First Kiss to be administered courtesy of the Royal Navy is an extremely dodgy narrative.
Evidence I have one actual family artefact: A Pestle from a Mortar and Pestle; and family history.
I used to work on the farm where the 'Mahogany Ship' is supposedly buried. Apparently it sailed up into the Merri River cutting and got trapped by the shifting sandbar at the mouth. The Mahogany ship is supposedly Portuguese from the early 1500s, but could also be Dutch from the 1600s. Also supposedly it was buried by shifting sands over the centuries before being reported in the mid 1800s, but apparently a discreet govt mission was sent to destroy the wreck so the ship's country of origin couldn't make a claim on Australia.
As for the Aboriginies when the conditions were suitable, like the Condah swamp, they settled down to a sedentry life working improved wetlands. Building stone weirs they kept the water level where they wanted it, caught eels and fish in traps and hunted the game that flocked to such good water supplies in summer. I wonder what European settlement would have been like if the first fleet had pulled up at Portland, only 50km from Condah and well within its food trading area.
Alas no physical evidence of the Mahogany ship exists, and not for want of trying. A reward of $250,000 was offered for physical evidence to no avail. A list of some 40 sighting reports has been compiled, here's a link to an 1876 letter to a Melbourne newspaper typical of these reports. http://www.swtafe.vic.edu.au/lrc/collections/mahoganyship/1876apr01.htm
A problem I have with these sorts of things is that they bring up non-British histroy of Australia as if it's significant when it clearly isn't. My favourite is the Chinese in the goldfields, true that they were a significant presence at the time but they left no lasting mark. There is no Chinese population in Ararat today, nor any Chinese buildings, yet there is a bloody great Chinese museum in Ararat. Similarly we talk up Portuguese, Dutch and French exploration and Maccasan contact and Aboriginie fish farming villiages. But when all's said and done this strikes me as an attempt to put some spice onto white bread. While we have a handful of non British place names the USA has entire Spanish and French cities.