For centuries northern Australia has been the point on this continent where contact was made between Asian and European cultures. It has been claimed that the Chinese 'discovered' this part of the world during their journeys of the early fifteenth century. Aborigines and Macassans have enjoyed a trade in sea products which is recorded in
Batavian correspondence as early as 1754, and which may date back more than one hundred years earlier. During the nineteenth century as many as a thousand Macassan men annually would undertake a six-month trading expedition along the coast of northern Australia.1
Although it was to be many years before European settlement in the area became permanent, the first European outpost was established at Port Essington in 1824. By 1888, however, the Chinese population numbered just over seven thousand, while the white population was recorded as being one thousand and nine. The domination by the Chinese of the non-Aboriginal population continued well into the twentieth century. At the turn of the twentieth century Greek people also were established in Darwin2, and today it is generally stated that their descendants form about ten percent of the population.
Contemporary Darwin is a city which asserts that it is the most multicultural of Australian cities, with particular reference to its substantial 'ethnic' populations. These include fifty-one ethnic groups and multicultural organisations as well as six ethnic schools .3 Today Northern Territory Government schools are turning out students fluent in Bahasa Indonesian, the national language of our nearest neighbour, and there is an ever increasing development of trade and education links between Darwin and Indonesia. These are the facts of the population and cultural context in which artist Mark Elliot-Ranken