Thinking About Encounters While Isolated

Description

In February Dr Leonie Stevens and I spent two wonderful weeks in Fremantle, Western Australia, undertaking a Dutch reading course for historians. This course was to help us with our new project. Perched on the top floor of the Western Australian Maritime Museum, we concentrated on our lessons with the occasional distraction of an incoming tanker, container ship, and even a cruise ship. The news flickered with stories of Coronavirus, mostly in China and Europe, and dozens of ships from these regions were lined up waiting to enter the harbour once they were cleared. On a Sunday we took the ferry to Rottnest Island, which local Noongar people know as Wadjemup. Rottnest, or as it appears on Willem de Vlamingh’s charts 't Eylandt 't Rottenest (Rats’ Nest Island), was named by de Vlamingh in 1696, implying he took the quokkas, short-tailed scrub wallabies, to resemble giant rats. These were the sorts of observations we had hoped to soon be reading in the Dutch and other records of encounter – glimpses about the people, their land, and its fauna.