Cirrus@Austlit

'Since pre-colonial days in northern Australia, cultural practices, material objects and living things have been exchanged and transformed across the sea. Biologists and archaeologists believe that Australia’s dingo was introduced by Asian seafarers around 4,000 years ago. It adapted and spread across the continent and was incorporated within Aboriginal cosmologies. From at least 1700, Makassar fishermen harvested trepang (or sea-cucumber) on an annual basis in Australia, with China also participating in this trade. Anthropologists in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth, Alfred Cort Haddon and Donald Thomson, noted the interweaving of cultural traditions among Indigenous populations spread across the Arafura Sea.' (Introduction)