Geographically speaking Australia and the Philippines share the same location in this part of the world – Asia and the Pacific region. Both countries share similar democratic tradition and proud of their respective pre-history, from the Mungo man found in New South Wales for Australia and the Tabon man found in Palawan for the Philippines.
Lake Mungo, one of several drylakes in the southeastern part of the Australian continent, became the site where the remains of ancient inhabitants of this continent were found. They consisted of three prominent sets of bodies. The first remains, also known as Mungo Lady, was discovered in southestern Australia in 1969 and considered the world’s oldest known cremations.
The second remains was discovered by a team of paleoanthropologists from the Australian National University in 1976 and estimated to have lived between 28,000 and 32,000 years ago. The third remains, discovered in 1974, was regarded as the early human inhabitants of the continent of Australia, believed to have lived between 68,000 and 40,000 years ago, during the Pleistocene period.
Australia can be considered, therefore, to have existed way back many centuries ago, if one will take into consideration the Aborigines culture, the original inhabitants of Australia whose descendants are still living today, mainly in the northern part of the country.
In the case of the prehistory of the Philippines, the Tabon man refers to the remains discovered in 1962 by American anthropologist, Dr. Robert B. Fox, then connected with the National Museum of the Philippines. The location was the Tabon Cave in Lipuun Point in Quezon, Palawan, in southern Philippines.
The Tabon man remains, actually fossilized fragments of a skull and jawbone of three individuals, and were believed to be the earliest remnants of human inhabitants found in the Philippines, although a much recent discovery, a metatarsal, also a fossilized remains discovered in Callao Cave, Peñablanca, Cagayan by Armand Salvador Mijares in 2007 and believed to have been 67,000 years old and authorities considered to be the remains of homo sapiens that antedate the Tabon Man which was dis-covered many years earlier.
The fragments found inside the Tabon caves are collectively called Tabon Man, named after the place where they were found. Authorities believed that the Tabon Cave served to be a sort of stone age factory where stone flake tools and waste core flakes were found at four separate levels inside the cave. William Henry Scott, a lay missionary of the Philippine Episcopal Church and a professorial lecturer in prehistoric Philippines, said in his book Prehispanic Source Materials for the study of Philippine History published in 1984, that the charcoal found in the cave was carbon dated, and it is estimated to have lived roughly 7,000, 20,000, and 22,000 BC ago.
Colonial history
Comparing, however, their colonial histories, the Philippines has a longer period of colonisation which started in 1565 and existed under four foreign flags, Spanish (1565-1898), English (1762-1764), Americans (1898-1946) and the Japanese (1941-1945 while Australia’s colonial history is only reflected in its colonial association with Great Britain starting in 1788, when a permanent British settlement was organised at Sydney in that year, then progressively followed by other states being created like South Australia in 1834, Victoria in 1851, Tasmania in 1856, Queensland in 1859, Darwin, now part of Northern Territory, in 1869, Western Australia in 1891, until the federation in 1901.
Historians and archaeo-logists admitted that the time British invaded Terra Australis, men had already been living in Australia for at least 10,000 years earlier. The early settlers migrated to Australia during the Pleistocene period. And this period coincided with the arrival of the first wave of human migrations from Asia into the widely uninhabited northern part of the continent.
Robert Hughes in his book, The Fatal Shore, stated that the first Australians came from Asia. He also said that when the pioneer Asian migrants came, they discovered Australia, perhaps, at that time, the continent was a quarter larger than it is now. Hughes described the period and said: ‘In the Pleistocene epoch the level of the Pacific was between 400 and 600 feet lower than it is today. One could walk from southern Australia into Tasmania, which was not yet an island. The Sahul Shelf, that shallow ledge of ocean floor whose waters separate Australia from New Guinea was dry land; Australia, New Guinea and possibly sections of the New Hebrides formed one landmass.’ The writer continued and said: ‘By trial and error, accumulated over many human generations, it would then have been possible to get people from Southeast Asia into Australia (via the Celebes and Borneo) across islands sprinkled on the sea like stepping-stones.’
Aborigine history
According to the same book, after a couple of thousand years, the Aborigines had left their shell-middens, flint chips, bone points and charcoal in nearly every habitable part of the continents and they had moved and lived stretching over the vast terrain, although their numbers were ‘ex-ceedingly thin.’ The early Australians wered divided into tribes and they had no idea of private property ownership, but regarded as intensely terri-torial, and very much link to the ancestral lands by hunting customs and ‘totemism.’
It is advanced by historians that there were only a hundred of tribes existed in the vast Australian continent at the time of the British invasion. In fact, when the First Fleet arrived, the Aborigines population was estimated, perhaps, only around 300,000 throughout the whole continent.
Commenting on this early migration activities, another historian, Geoffrey Blainey, believed that ‘Australia was merely the chance terminus of a series of voyages and migrations.’ It was along these lines that Australia was settled by people considered the pioneer dwellers of Down Under.
In the Philippines the early written information about the original natives of various islands which later became known today as the Philippines, was mentioned in Chinese records long time before the arrival of the Europeans in the 16th century. Some of the evidences include old Chinese records and the artifacts excavated by archaeologist in various parts of the archipelago. In fact, the early inhabitants of these islands were recorded in the Chinese annals as early as A.C. 982 where vibrant trade activities between Chinese traders and island dwellers of various islands of the Philippines were mentioned.
The first detailed account of the early natives of the Philippines was recorded by Chau Ju-Kua in 1225 where Chinese merchants visited Ma-i (historians believed to be referring to Mindoro), one of the islands in the Philippines, where ‘over a thousand families are settled together along both banks of a creek (or gully).’ In trading with the Chnese merchants, the early products of the Philippines were identified as ‘yellow wax, cotton, pearls, tortoise-shell, medicinal beter-nuts, and yuta cloth.’
Mai Island
Closer to Australia down south of the archipelago, Chinese records described the early inhabitants of a group of islands and compared their way of living with those they had trade with in Ma-i. The Chinese called group of islands as San-su which consisted of Kia-ma-yen, Pa-lau-yu, and Pa-ki-nung. Many scholars believed that the islands being referred to are the islands of Calamianes, Busuanga, ang Palawan where according to Chinese written records lived in ‘each [island] … its own tribes scatter over the islands.’
The same Chinese written account stated that ‘their customs are about the same as those of Ma-i. Each tribe consists of about one thousand families.’ One of the early tribes and its location was described as ‘in the remotest valleys there lives another tribe called Hai-tan [negritos according to historians].
They are small in stature and their eyes are round and yellow (brown), they have curly hair and their teeth show (between their lips). They nest in tree tops. Sometimes parties of three or five lurkin the jungle, from whence they shoot arrows on passers-by without being seen, and many have fallen victims to them. If thrown a porcelain bowl, they will stoop and pick up and g away leaping and shouting for joy.’
Another ancient Chinese record refers to Tao-i-chich-lio written in 1349 by Wan Ta-yuan, a Chinese traveller who visited many islands in South Seas. One of these islands visited was Min-to-lang believed to be the present Mindanao, same opinion according to Rizal, also close to Australia. Describing Mindanao, the Chinese adventurer said ‘adjacent to the sea, this place is the important gateway. There is a stream connecting with the sea. The water is not salty. The soil is very fertile. The rice and corn are plentiful.
The weather is hot. In their customs they esteem thriftiness. Both men and women do up their hair in a mallet-lie tress. They wear short black shirt, and the blue petticoat. The people dig wells for drinking water. They boil sea-water to make salt, and ferment rice to make liquor. They have a chief (or chiefs). They prohibit robbery which is punished by putting the robber’s family to death. The natural products are ‘wuli wood’, musk, sandalwood, cotton, and niu -jii leather.’
Magellan
In the Philippine successful landing in the Philippines of the Magellan Expedition in 1521 did not automatically converted the islands into a single cohesive colony of Spain. For it took a little more than three decades later that the Spanish crown successfully established its foothold in Asia and the Pacific through the arrival of Adelantado Miguel Lopez de Legazpi in 1565 and who founded Cebu, the first Spanish settlement in this part of the world. Subsequent events, in less than a decade, resulted in the establishment in 1571 of Manila, as the capital of the Philippines. This give way later to the total conversion of the different islands into one single colonial Spanish entity.
A little more than two centuries later, in Australia shortly after the conclusion of the voyage of Captain Cook in the South Seas in 1775, England did not act right away to establish a British colony in Australia. There was a mis-giving as to the appropriateness of a distant continent in the Pacific to become a British colony.
As far as authoirities were concerned, Australia was not fit for a colony of trade like Calcutta, nor a British colonial settlement like Jamaica. However, certain events would change this attitude and the British empire would have another look at Australia as a possible colony.
At almost the same period in 1775, the older North American colonies had revolted against Britain, with George Washington heading a colonists’ army attacking the English controlled city of Boston.
This was the start of the American Revolutionary War that lasted until 1782. The thirteen British colonies in North American continent fought against the interference of the British colonial govern-ment in the affairs of the colonies and this eventually resulted to the formation of the United States of America. The birth of the American nation, independent from the British did not, however, make an immediate impact on the people living in Australia.
British fleet
While the American revo-lution was raging, a British fleet of eleven English ships left Portsmouth in 1787 destined for Australia. With the fleet were two armed naval vessels, three storeships or cargo ships, and six transports, carrying British passengers to form part of the first British settlement in Australia. Describing the the transport vessels, historian Geoffrey Blainy in his bo
ok The Tyranny of Distance said ‘The transports, however, could hardly be called orthodox passenger ships. Anyone who visited them would have seen iron bars bolted over the hatchways, loopholes through which muskets could be fired into the passengers’ quarters, and a barricade fitted with pointed iron prongs on the upper deck near the maintan mast.’ This was the first shipment of convicted criminals to be resettled at a penal colony that was finally decided and to be located in far-away Australia.
The making of Australia as a British penal colony, according historian Blainey is somewhat linked to the American revolution which deprived Britain a destination for convicts that have been regularly offloaded from English gaols and prison hulks. The overcrowding of criminals forced Britain to resettle those convicts intended for North American colonies to Australia, purely as a penal colony.
As both countries developed into separate progressive colonies of Britain, in the case of Australia, and of Spain, in the case of the Philippines, destiny and suceeding historical developments would later connect the two former European colonies.
This is part of current research for a book by the author tentatively titled Connecting Two Cultures: Australia and the Philippines. Reactions and comments are welcome to help polish and improve this manuscript.