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| (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
Five copper coins and a nearly
70-year-old map with an ‘‘X’’ might lead to a discovery that could rewrite
Australia’s history.
Australian scientist Ian McIntosh,
currently Professor of Anthropology at Indiana University in the US, plans an
expedition in July that has stirred up the archaeological community.
The scientist wants to revisit the
location where five coins were found in the Northern Territory in 1944 that
have proven to be 1000 years old, opening up the possibility that seafarers
from distant countries might have landed in Australia much earlier than what is
currently believed.
Back in 1944 during World War II,
after Japanese bombers had attacked Darwin two years earlier, the Wessel
Islands - an uninhabited group of islands off Australia’s north coast - had
become a strategic position to help protect the mainland.
Australian soldier Maurie Isenberg
was stationed on one of the islands to man a radar station and spent his spare
time fishing on the idyllic beaches.
While sitting in the sand with his
fishing-rod, he discovered a handful of coins in the sand.
He didn’t have a clue where they
could come from but pocketed them anyway and later placed them in a tin.
In 1979 he rediscovered his
‘‘treasure’’ and decided to send the coins to a museum to get them identified.
The coins proved to be 1000 years
old.Still not fully realising what treasure he held in his hands, he marked an
old colleague’s map with an ‘‘X’’ to remember where he had found them.
The discovery was apparently
forgotten again until anthropologist McIntosh got the ball rolling a few months
ago.
The coins raise many important
questions: How did 1000-year-old coins end up on a remote beach on an island
off the northern coast of Australia?
Did explorers from distant lands
arrive on Australian shores way before James Cook claimed it for the British
throne in 1770?
We do know already that Captain Cook
wasn’t the first white seafarer to step on Australia’s shores.
In 1606 a Dutch explorer named
Willem Janszoon reached the Cape York peninsula in Queensland, closely followed
a few years late by another Dutch seafarer Dirk Hartog.
And the Spaniard Luiz Vaez de Torres
discovered the strait between Papua New Guinea and Australia, which was later
named Torres Strait in his honour.
However, none of these explorers
recognised that they had discovered the famed southern continent, the ‘‘terra
australis incognita’’, which was depicted as a counterweight to the known land
masses of the northern hemisphere on many world maps of the day.
McIntosh and his team of Australian
and American historians, archaeologists, geomorphologists and Aboriginal
rangers say that the five coins date back to the 900s to 1300s.
They are African coins from the
former Kilwa sultanate, now a World Heritage ruin on an island off Tanzania.
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