From The Edge reveals little-known story of first contact

In 1797, five British sailors and 12 Bengali seamen swam ashore at 90 Mile Beach in Victoria after their longboat was ripped apart in a storm while they were on a mission to get help for their fellow shipwreck survivors stranded on an island in the Bass Strait. 

With no alternative, they set out to hike 700km north to Sydney. As they walked, they met about 10 different tribal groups, including the Djiringanj people between what is now Merimbula and Bermagui. 

This journey has been detailed in Professor Mark McKenna’s book From The Edge: Australia’s Lost Histories, released last year. 

“The walk itself has never been more than a page in most histories,” he said. 

“The big thing for me is that this story shows how Australia was already a country with different territories.

“As they walked, they realised it wasn’t just ‘the natives’; there were different territories, different laws and customs, and different languages as they moved through.” 

Professor McKenna, an award-winning historian who lives in Towamba, said the men survived because they were fed by the First Australians they encountered on the way. 

The local people they met allowed them to camp with them, ferried them across river mouths and guides showed them routes to take. 

“They wouldn’t have made it without the help of the Aboriginal people,” Professor McKenna said. 

While only three out of the 17 were known to have survived the trek, most of the Bengalis were left behind at Moruya as they could not go on – they may have died or been adopted into a local tribe. 

Professor McKenna said the majority of records for the story came from a lost journal written by one of the sailors out of which excerpts were published in an Indian newspaper. 

He said while the travellers initially viewed the local people with fear and recoiled from them, eventually the sailor described them as his “Aboriginal friends”. 

“It’s a story that has a lot of resonance with Aboriginal communities as it shows the curiosity the groups had back then and shows them as being the ones that were in control, as the ones assisting the Europeans,” he said. 

“In that sense it is a complete inversion of the normal situation, as this time the whites are at the mercy of the blacks.”