At certain points along the wild and unspoilt coastline of the Northern Territory’s Arnhem Land and Western Australia’s Kimberley, tamarind trees provide shade from the blistering sun. The trees aren’t native, and yet they’ve been here for centuries.
The answer to this riddle is that they were planted here by what were most likely Australia’s first outside visitors. It wasn’t the British, the French or even the Dutch, but traders from the port of Makassar on the island of Sulawesi in present-day Indonesia.
The traders came seeking sea cucumbers, which they dried into a product called trepang or bêche-de-mer. And they brought more than just the tamarinds. First Nations peoples interacted with the Makassans, exchanging language and dugout canoes, and even intermarrying. They were involved in international trade well before the European world really knew where Australia was.
More than a sea slug
To understand the significance of the sea cucumber trade, it’s useful to first understand the animal. Definitely not sea slugs, they are members of the echinoderm group, making them related to sea stars and sea urchins. They’re typically cylinder-shaped with five rows of tube feet operated by a water vascular system. Interestingly, the anus not only discharges waste but is also used for breathing.
There are more than 1000 species of sea cucumber worldwide. At least 160 species live in Australian waters. And in deep-sea environments, many new species are still being discovered.
“I know of at least four new species that have been described already this year,” says Associate Professor Zoe Richards, curator of marine invertebrate zoology at the Western Australian Museum.
Some sea cucumbers have evolved with surprising habits. The black sea cucumber (Holothuria leucospilota) can shoot sticky threads from its anus in defence, while the leopard sea cucumber (Bohadschia argus) often has a tiny pearl fish residing inside its anus. Zoe says her favourite is the swimming sea cucumber (Enypniastes eximia), which lives in the deep sea.
“It was given the unfortunate common name of ‘headless chicken monster’ by the scientists who first observed it swimming,” Zoe says.
“It has large paddle-like fins which help it swim, but they thought its ‘wings’ made it look like a headless chicken flapping around.”
Quirky habits aside, sea cucumbers provide habitat for hitchhiking crabs and molluscs, and food for animals such as flatback turtles. They also play a vital ecosystem role.
“They consume sediment, which keeps the sea floor clean and suppresses diseases that may otherwise infect corals or fishes,” Zoe says.
Sea cucumbers were (and still are) a delicacy in China, where they are prized for their nutritional and medicinal properties. So lucrative was the early trepang industry that fishermen made the perilous journey to northern Australia from Makassar, sailing in wooden, single-hull ships known as praus (or prahus).
The journey took place around December each year, harnessing the north-west monsoonal winds. The fishermen would spend about three or four months living in northern Australia, where they would collect and dry sea cucumbers along with shark fins, pearl shells, shark meat, turtle shells and trochus (sea snails). When the winds changed, they would sail home with their catch.
They came in large numbers. In 1803 navigator Matthew Flinders recorded in his journal that he’d encountered a Makassan captain named Pobassoo who said he was part of a larger fleet of 60 praus carrying about 1000 men. Arnhem Land is the best-documented destination for Makassan visitors, and First Nations communities here have an uninterrupted oral history of the visits that continue today.
Tales of the Makassans
Distinguished professor Lynette Russell of Monash University is the chief investigator of the project Global Encounters and First Nations Peoples: 1000 Years of Australian History. She and her colleagues have documented many stories of Makassans in the NT, including interactions with communities from Elcho Island, Groote Eylandt and the Gulf of Carpentaria coast.
Lynette says that although these vessels originated from the port of Makassar, the people sailing on them were of many ethnicities including Makassarese, Buginese, Butonese, Bajau and potentially Javanese. The Makassan trepangers also visited the Kimberley, although the extent of the trade is less well-known.
Dr Corioli Souter, head of maritime heritage at the Western Australian Museum, has worked on archaeological digs in the Kimberley, furthering work that began in the 1960s. Her work near Kalumburu is part of the joint management of the North Kimberley Marine Park with the Kwini Balanggarra and Wunambal Gaambera people in cooperation with the WA Department of Biodiversity, Conservation and Attractions.
“Our excavations were in 2019 and 2021, and a lot of the Elders came down looking at our material,” Corioli says. “They’re working with our results as well.
“The sites are signified by these lines of stones, which are actually individual cooking hearths. You could get four, five or six of them where they would put big pots on to boil down the trepang. They’d then dry it and smoke it and prepare it for transshipment back to Indonesia, where it would then go off to Chinese markets.”
Inside the WA Museum Boola Bardip, Corioli points out artefacts from one of these archaeological sites.
“Bernadette Waina, who’s one of the Elders we work with there, she actually found this little spout of a teapot,” Corioli says. The display also showcases a musket ball, a fishing hook, the top of a cooking pot and pieces of ceramic pots that are confirmed to be of Southeast Asian origin.
The timeline of the trepang trade is difficult to nail down definitively. According to Lynette, archaeological studies in the NT indicate people could have been visiting northern Australia, probably in ‘drift’ voyages, between the years of about 1000 to 1550.
“Then from 1550 to 1750 we have what we call ‘voyaging entrepreneurs’ – people from islands of Southeast Asia semi-regularly meeting with Australian people seeking resources [and] maritime commerce including, of course, trepang,” she says.
“The proper trepang industry really takes off around the mid part of the 18th century, and that’s really well-documented in written archival records, particularly those based in the port of Makassar.”
In the Kimberley, Corioli’s team used radiocarbon and accelerator mass spectrometry to date organic materials such as charcoal and marine shells from hearths at trepang processing sites. This dating suggests the Makassans were visiting potentially from as early as 1600. Aboriginal rock art depicts Makassan praus, and this is another mechanism for dating, although it’s not definitive.
The Sulawesi legacy
Regardless of when the trepang industry began, it’s clear the Makassans left a legacy. They introduced First Nations peoples to tobacco, smoking pipes, calico, fishhooks and, in Arnhem Land, dugout canoes. This cultural mashup also led to an exchange of language. Hundreds of words borrowed from Malay, Bugis and Makassarese are still used in northern First Nations communities.
Before Christianity arrived in this part of Australia, the Muslim Makassans had already shared some religious ideas. Prayer-men (or imams) accompanied their fleets. Lynette says representations of Islam are found in First Nations artworks. “Often you get a star or an anchor,” she says. “Both of these things are traceable to Islam.”
In the NT, at least, it seems the residents and the visitors mostly coexisted in harmony. “These are people who were very, very connected to their country,” Lynette says of the Traditional Owners. “But the Makassans didn’t arrive intending to take the land off them. What’s clear to me is what emerges out of this trade is friendship.”
The ultimate expression of this friendship was that many First Nations passengers were known to sail back to Sulawesi with the Makassans. They were mostly young men, apparently seeking adventure. Some of these travellers stayed and had families in Makassar, and stories exist of others who returned, perhaps leaving a Makassar-born family behind. Conversely, some Makassan traders had First Nations wives and children.
From 1883, the South Australian government that administered the present-day NT started charging Makassans for a fishing licence, which likely diminished the viability of the industry. After Federation in 1901 and the introduction of the White Australia policy, the Australian Government saw little advantage in trading with our Asian neighbours, focusing on other exports to Britain.
The last Makassan prau sailed to northern Australia in 1907, after which the SA government refused to renew fishing licences for non-Australian operators. In some cases, friends and families became divided.
However, given the long tradition of Indonesian fishing in Australian waters, traditional fishing rights in some Australian waters still exist today under an intergovernmental memorandum of understanding (MOU). Some 200 nautical miles north of Broome in an area including Seringapatam, Scott and Ashmore Reef, the ‘MOU Box’ is a designated area where (excluding sanctuary zones) artisanal fishers may catch certain species, including sea cucumbers. Fishers may only fish from non-motorised boats, and by traditional means. The Australian Border Force patrols these waters, and fishers in breach of these conditions risk jail or seeing their vessels confiscated or burned.
Harvest from the sea
In a full-circle moment, First Nations peoples, albeit further south, are reviving the ancient trepang industry. Established by Malgana Traditional Owners in Shark Bay in WA, Tidal Moon is a wild sea cucumber harvesting business that combines Western science with traditional land and sea management techniques. In 2017 it was granted an Aboriginal fishing licence to harvest sea cucumbers.
The company harvests six sea cucumber species in Shark Bay, including the deepwater redfish (Actinopyga echinites), black teatfish (Holothuria whitmaei) and the surf redfish (Actinopyga mauritiana). Divers hand-pick the sea cucumbers, which are later dried and sold from Tidal Moon’s Denham factory.
So far, 14 people have received dive training. “Once you train people up, they have those skills. That human capital cannot be confiscated; they take those skills on to other places, and they have an economic output,” says Malgana man Michael Wear, Tidal Moon’s managing director.
“The best feeling you get is to see the emergence of a middle class, to see people move out of poverty. It makes a big difference to health, family, children [and] just overall wellbeing.”
Tidal Moon is exploring Western medicine applications for sea cucumbers through partnerships with several universities and medical research institutions. The company’s factory is being upgraded to export standards. As the company scales up, Michael plans to breed sea cucumbers in a land-based facility, removing the need for ocean harvesting.
Extensive seagrass beds grow in the same ecosystem as sea cucumbers, so Michael also sees further opportunities for First Nations peoples in seagrass restoration. Seagrasses store up to 10 times as much carbon as rainforests, so Tidal Moon and its trained divers are poised to participate in the emerging ‘blue carbon’ economy.
In September 2024 Tidal Moon received a groundbreaking 13-year permit for seagrass translocation in the Shark Bay World Heritage Area, and in 2023, the company received a $2.2 million BHP Blue Carbon Breakthrough Grant.
“The work that we do, we do for many reasons, but one of them is for our Elders,” Michael says. “We know what they went through, and we want to make sure, before they go on, that they see Country has been looked after, and the next generation is keeping culture alive.”
It seems fitting that the humble sea cucumber, Australia’s oldest export, is set to be part of that positive future.