Australia's First Nations Foreign Policy modelled on a time when the First Australians appeased Bugis pirates- A danger that lanun misunderstood has caused muddleheaded thinking which will lead Albanese to seek appeasement with China

 by Ganesh Sahathevan 

Possibly the only known photographs of Aboriginal voyagers to Makassar, taken in 1873.(Museo Nazionale Pigorini)

When Australia's Prime Minister Anthony Albanese visited Indonesia recently he returned via Makasssar.  Echoing conventional Australian wisdom he said: 

"Centuries ago, the sea route between here and northern Australia was alive with a flourishing trade," Albanese said in a speech to students and alumni at Hasanuddin University on Tuesday.

"Each December, the Yolngu people of Arnhem Land would look to the sea, waiting for the horizon to fill with the sails of Makassar vessels.

"It laid down the foundation stone for the people-to-people contact that is at the very heart of Australia's relationship with the people of Indonesia."

This then is the foundation of Australia's new First Nations centred foreign policy. However, the conventional wisdom does seem more grounded in the Aboriginal dreamtime than it is in reality for the Makassar vessels brought Bugis, who are best known in South East Asia, to this day, as pirates. The roving bandit syndrome well describes their activities throughout the Malay Archipelago, and Northern Australia. 

This fact is usually ignored in Australian accounts of the trepang "trade", which go so far as to attribute to the Yolngu the concept of licensing of fishery rights when ownership of land is to this day a concept alien to Australia's aboriginal people. 

 However, even the more romantic accounts of the Yolgnu-Makassar relations has had to acknowledge this more nightmarish aspect of the dreamtime story:

Makassan captains were also immortalised in Yolŋu law as ancestral ghosts with the potential for malevolence. This reflected the reality that, while Makassan seafarers imported goods that were useful and desirable to the Yolŋu, their presence could also bring conflict.

While this account seems closer to the truth of what encounters with the Bugis would have been like, it does seem, even then, to consider the Yolgnu as being on equal footing with the seafarers they feared, when they imported goods from the Makassans. Given the inequality in power it is more likely that the Makasans provided the Yolgnu inducements in the form of alcohol and other low cost commodities so that the Yolgnu would work for them in processing trepang. The photo above taken from 1873 is likely to be that of Yolgnu captured and sold into slavery in Makassar. 

The danger now is that this muddleheaded thinking based on the fantasy of  Ylognu-Macassan relations will cause Albanese to seek a policy of appeasement with China, in the name of trade and investment.Albanese needs to learn and consider the meaning of lanun, the Malay for word for pirate. It is often used as an adjective for the Bugis. 

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