The Australian colonies and the Coral Sea

Early Spanish attempts at settlement in the New Hebrides and the Solomon Islands proved disastrous. Navigation techniques remained poor, and not until the late eighteenth century with the invention of accurate chronometers were Europeans able to relocate these sixteenth-century discoveries and then slowly to chart the remainder of the scattered islands.

Unofficial contact with the islands around the Coral Sea began soon after settlement at Sydney, setting the scene for later tapping of the indigenous labour reserve. Early ships bringing convicts to New South Wales were refitted for whaling voyages, while others began to trade in tortoiseshell, sandalwood and beches-de-mer (sea slugs) among the Pacific islands. From the 1820s the Royal Navy Australian Station began intensive official voyaging combined with hydrographic surveys, and Christian missionaries also used Sydney for their outreach into Melanesia onwards from the 1830s.

The maritime frontier of Queensland, just as important as its land frontier after its set­tlement in the 1840s, spread into island Melanesia. Queensland’s colonists interacted just as much with Melanesians around the Coral Sea as with Aborigines. The Coral Sea was thus incorporated into New South Wales and Queensland economic activities long before colonial partition of the islands. In the 1860s and 1870s recruiting of Melanesian inden­tured labour for Queensland began in the Loyalty Islands (part of New Caledonia) and the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu), spreading to the Solomon Islands and the archipelagos off New Guinea. Such labour developed Queensland’s agricultural, pastoral and maritime industries, leading in 1883 to the colony’s attempt to annex north-east Melanesia. Queensland settlers also moved through the Torres Strait onto the mainland of New Guinea and its archipelagos. Explorers, naval expeditions mapping reefs and islands, traders, missionaries, goldminers, labour recruiters and finally government officials proceeded to the great ‘unclaimed’ island to the north. Communications, finances and the early administration of what became British New Guinea were within Queensland’s orbit and Queensland remained closely associated with Britain’s east New Guinea Protectorate (1884-1888) and later colony (1888-1906), while Queensland-based shipping established regular communications throughout the Coral Sea.