Narrative Of The Surveying Voyage Of H.M. S. Fly, Paperback – 3 November 2011

I have a fascination for flooded Sahul. In the last, severe ice age, exposed land we now call Sahul linked Tasmania, the Australian mainland and the island of New Guinea. It provided a way for primitive Australians, who emerged from Africa possibly 60,000 years ago - or even more - to colonise the southern continent and for a branch to people New Guinea. They were on the move for perhaps 15,000 years, or 750 generations who evolved as they moved.It was hardly a migration. These small, black people flowed rather than consciously marched mainly along the wide coasts, left much bigger than today, as the seas retreated into the ice caps and glaciers of the north and south.The pressures that drew them were probably plentiful food supplies while rival humans pushed them. We know they were Homo sapiens and hence capable of thought, memory and religion. They must have had leaders, who organised their crossing of the last obstacle at the eastern end of Indonesia, the Timor gap, where a 110km channel separated them from the huge, unpeopled territory of Sahul, extending from close to the equator south to Tasmania and southern Australia's ice sheets.The sea returned with the melting of the ice to flood between Tasmania and the mainland (Bass Strait) and New Guinea and Cape York (Torres Strait).Before the inundation and flowing through Indonesia, the Australian tribes (who possibly started with fewer than 1000 families) had intimate contact with an extinct branch of humanity, recently discovered, we know as the Denisovans. These Asians differed from Europe and the Middle East's Neanderthals. In the last couple of years, mitochondrial research indicates a high proportion of Denisovan genes in Australian and Melanesian populations.Did the migrating Australians travel with Denisovan colonies or were they interbreeding for some time? We'll never know. The palaeo-anthropological evidence, if it exists, lies in flooded Sahul.I'm an urban Australian of Tasmanian descent, who has travelled in Cape York and Torres Strait and lived in what is now Papua New Guinea, Indonesia and Southeast Asia. So I allow my imagination to roam over this period, 40,000 to 50,000 years BP.Ah yes! HMS Fly and her predecessor HMS Rattlesnake. The Royal Naval expedition explored and charted flooded Sahul to help ships navigating from India and Asia to the Australian colonies and the Pacific. Their journals provide an intriguing snapshot of the straits and land almost two centuries ago. First impressions. A fresh, new world we now know to be incredibly ancient - if only we could walk it!The chronicles are beautifully written, eminently suitable for dipping into. The "print on demand" book is a lovely volume to handle and, as I recall, was a snip at the price. Now it's one of my prized possessions. Rattlesnake's journals are on the Internet and cry out to be assembled in such a loving manner.John StackhouseNorth Turramurra NSWAustralia