Reddit mentions of Batavia's Graveyard: The True Story of the Mad Heretic Who Led History's Bloodiest Meeting

I presume that by this question you are asking whether the British faced the threat that rival colonial empires might try to establish themselves in Australia – not that they faced "competition" from the indigenous population, which is a very different matter. If I'm wrong about this, perhaps you could clarify.

Britain was not the first state to "discover" Australia. Makassan fisherman from Sulawesi, in the Indonesian archipelago, regularly visited the northern and north-western coast from around the middle of the 17th century to collect trepang (sea cucumbers), which had become a popular ingredient in Chinese cookery. These men arrived in significant numbers, several thousand per season, and stayed for 4-6 months at a time in semi-permanent camps on the coast, occasionally even over-wintering. But they were able to establish largely friendly and collaborative relations with the local peoples, who often provided additional labour in season. So friendly were relations, indeed, that a small Aboriginal "colony", made up of adventurous Aboriginal men and women doing what amounted to contract work for ship-masters, existed in Makassar throughout the 19th, and probably the 18th, centuries. I wrote in much more detail about the trepang trade and the Aboriginal colony here. As a result, there was no need for any attempt on the part of the Makassans to forcibly seize land or establish permanent settlements.

With regard to the European side if things, it's plausible (though there is no firm evidence) that Portuguese ships reached the north-western tip of Australia from Timor, a voyage of only 400 miles, during the 16th century, and certain that Dutch ships encountered the north-east tip (the Cape York peninsula) in the first decade of the 17th century, and the southern part of what is now Western Australia in the 1610s and 1620s. The latter encounters were made by chance but the former were explicitly intended to discover whether Australia had resources or trade that were worth exploiting. Later, in 1629, two Dutch sailors who had taken part in the infamous Batavia mutiny, on a small group of islands off the western Australian coast, were intentionally marooned on the mainland as a punishment, but with the idea that a later ship would call for them. These men were instructed to make friends with the local Aboriginal tribes "in order to discover once, for certain, what happens in this land." I wrote at book length about the Batavia, including a chapter about the aftermath of the mutiny and about the two or more Dutch shipwrecks that cast other sailors adrift on the western Australian coast, here.

So the Dutch were certainly potential traders with, or colonisers of, parts of Australia almost two centuries before the British first sent convicts and settlers there. The reason they didn't press on with their exploration was that they had the misfortune to encounter two especially unwelcoming parts of the Australian coast. The Wik peoples of the Cape York peninsula were among the most hostile Aboriginal groups when it came to encounters with Europeans, and at least two Dutch ships lost a significant number of men to attacks by Wik warriors. This, and the fact that no ships touching on the northern coast found any evidence of resources worth trading, deterred further exploration.

The situation on the west coast was if possible even less promising. Dutch ships quite often encountered Western Australia in the period before the development of an effective way of determining longitude at sea. This was because the fastest route on their voyage from Amsterdam to their trading bases in Java involved exploiting the fast current that ran east across the Roaring Forties. If wind and current pushed the dozen or more ships that made this voyage each year west faster than anticipated, they would make a landfall somewhere on the southern part of the western coast. This is one of the bleakest parts of Australia - very sparsely populated, with only two or three small rivers making the ocean and breaking what is otherwise a more or less continuous run of almost 400 miles of vertiginous cliffs, backed by a dry, featureless hinterland, a sight described by one awed Dutch sailor of the 1620s as follows: "The land here appears very bleak, and so abrupt as if the coast had been chopped off with an axe, which makes it almost impossible to land." So unpromising did the prospects of making any money here appear that the Dutch never bothered to send a ship back for the marooned Batavia mutineers, and though Abel Tasman was sent to make a circumnavigation of the Australian continent in the 1640s, he executed his task while staying out of sight of land, other than encountering the southerly island today named for him – Tasmania.

The Dutch, therefore, made no further significant efforts to investigate Australia. We can conclude, then, that one of the main factors that left the continent free for British exploitation was simply luck; the British were the first to encounter the rather more promising stretch of Australian coast in New South Wales, well away from any Dutch landing spots. Even then, however, they saw Australia more as a useful site for a penal colony, designed to drain off the "criminal class" they had exported to the Americas before the American Revolution, than as a potentially lucrative colonial acquisition.

As a post-script, it's worth noting that things did change in the nineteenth century, when the acquisition of colonies became a higher priority for European states, and more organised attempts were made to find worthwhile areas for invasion and conquest. The reason that the British established the Swan River Colony in 1829 and annexed Western Australia was that they feared the French planned to set up a rival administration on the far side of the continent. A French expedition had been sent to explore the area and consider its suitability for exploitation in 1801-03.

Sources

Jaap Bruijn, "Between Batavia and the Cape: shipping patterns of the Dutch East India Company," Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 11 (1980)

George Collingridge, The Discovery of Australia: A Critical, Documentary and Historical Investigation Concerning the Priority of Discovery in Australasia Before the Arrival of Lieut. James Cook in the Endeavour in the Year 1770 (1895)

Femme Gaastra, "The Dutch East India Company: a reluctant discoverer." The Great Circle 19 (1997)

J. E. Heeres, The Part Borne by the Dutch in the Discovery of Australia, 1606-1756 (1899)

James Henderson, Sent Forth a Dove: Discovery of the Duyfken (1999)

Leslie Marchant, France Australe: A study of the French explorations and attempts to found a
penal colony and strategic base in south western Australia, 1503-1826 (1982)

Batavia's Graveyard is about a mutiny on one of the Dutch East India Company's ships in the 17th century. I loved the book and never want to get on a boat ever again!

Here are some links for the product in the above comment for different countries:

Amazon Smile Link: Batavia's Graveyard


|Country|Link|
|:-----------|:------------|
|Spain|amazon.es|
|Mexico|amazon.com.mx|
|France|amazon.fr|
|Germany|amazon.de|
|Japan|amazon.co.jp|
|Canada|amazon.ca|
|Australia|amazon.com.au|
|Italy|amazon.it|




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