Reconnecting with South‑East Asia

The Yolngu people of eastern Arnhem Land and trepang fishers operating out of the Sulawesi port of Macassar share a transnational heritage through the trade in trepang (sea cucumber) that has lasted for generations and created family, community and cultural links between peoples. Their history of mobility interrupts the assumptions of indigenous people as fixed and local that have been so central to colonial discourses of indigeneity. This chapter, like that of Lachy Paterson’s in this volume, explores an example of indigenous and non-European encounter through travel, thereby undermining assumptions that Europeans were necessarily central to indigenous travel.1