Historical Fiction Favenc, Ernest: Marooned on Australia (1896); v1, 12 March 2023

[Pulpmeister]

This is a "lost civilisation" story, set in Australia, and Chapter 1 is all true, though somewhat fictionalised. The Dutch East Indies Co's brand new flagship the Batavia was wrecked on the Abrolhos Islands off the Western Australian coast in 1629. The captain and some crew managed to row a ship's boat all the way to Batavia, and come back to rescue the hundreds of castaways, only to find that there had been massacres and mutiny. The mutineers were hanged; all but two, who were marooned on the mainland.

This novel is an imaginary account of the two marooned sailors, their travels in Australia (then uncolonised "New Holland") and the discovery of a small lost civilsation. It is an adventure story, which also incorporates accounts of some seeming oddities encountered by later explorers, including the strange "Wandjina" cave paintings of the Kimberly.

(No trace has ever been found of the two marooned men, but it is certain that they died within a few miles of where they were landed, on a dry, inhospitable shore of hard, prickly and near impebnetrable "coastal scrub".)

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