Australia has long been considered the continent of hunter-gatherers (e.g. Lourandos 1997). There has been a tendency to assume that Aboriginal people in Australia persisted in the foraging mode until historical times because they had been isolated from the rest of the world and its different economic histories. While most archaeologists agree that Australia was almost certainly first colonized from Southeast Asia, there has been a reluctance to accept further contact after that initial settlement (Bowdler 1993). However, there is evidence to suggest that such contact did occur at various times in the past. In this chapter, I present archaeological and historic evidence to suggest that contacts between traders of the southern Southeast Asian archipelagos and Aborigines of the northern coast of Australia have been more or less continuous over several millennia and possibly date back to 5000 BP. However, to flesh out the dynamics of these trade relations, I concentrate on interaction with traders outside the continent in the relatively recent past for which we have a larger corpus of archaeological data, oral histories, and written accounts, specifically the case of Aboriginal trade with the Macassans of southern Sulawesi.

In 1803, Matthew Flinders, as he carried out the first English circumnavigation of the Australian continent, encountered a fleet of Indonesian boats (praus or prahus) off the coast of Arnhem Land (Figure 8.1).