Qualla: Wessel Islands https://qualla.com/wessel-islands en-us © 2026 Bendyline Mon, 27 Jul 2026 10:40:32 GMT Qualla serial false Qualla support@bendyline.com yes https://qualla.com/_m/r/j/c/n/wessel-islands-wp/hero-small.webp Qualla: Wessel Islands https://qualla.com/wessel-islands Wessel Islands: Introduction https://qualla.com/wessel-islands/ Photo credit Tentotwo, CC BY-SA 3.0. A soldier stationed on a remote beach in 1944, killing time with a fishing line, pushed his hand into the sand and pulled out nine coins. Four were Dutch. The other five had Arabic inscriptions and turned out to be roughly 900 years old, struck in the sultanate of Kilwa on an island off the coast of Tanzania. They remain the oldest foreign-made objects ever found on Australian soil, and nobody can fully explain how they got to the Wessel Islands. This long, narrow chain trails northeast off the corner of Arnhem Land like a dropped string of beads, the homeland of saltwater people who have read these waters for tens of thousands of years.

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]]> Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/r/j/c/n/wessel-islands-wp/rjcn-wessel-islands-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full Wessel Islands: A String Across the Sea https://qualla.com/wessel-islands/ Photo credit Tentotwo, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Wessels run in an almost straight line from Buckingham Bay and the Napier Peninsula out into the Arafura Sea, splintering into a procession of slender islands. Marchinbar is the largest. Beyond it lie Guluwuru, Raragala, Rimbija and a scatter of smaller landmasses, many of th...

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]]> Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/r/j/c/n/wessel-islands-wp/rjcn-wessel-islands-a-string-across-the-sea.mp3 0:06 2 full Wessel Islands: The Coins That Should Not Be There https://qualla.com/wessel-islands/ Photo credit Tentotwo, CC BY-SA 3.0. Morry Isenberg waited thirty-five years before sending his coins to be authenticated. When the results came back in 1979, they were startling: five of the nine were Kilwan, minted in a medieval East African trading empire that dealt in gold, ivory and enslaved people across the I...

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]]> Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/r/j/c/n/wessel-islands-wp/rjcn-wessel-islands-the-coins-that-should-not-be-there.mp3 0:06 3 full Wessel Islands: Mapped by a Doomed Voyage https://qualla.com/wessel-islands/ Photo credit Tentotwo, CC BY-SA 3.0. The European name arrived by way of catastrophe. In April 1636, two small Dutch yachts assembled in the Banda Islands, the Cleen Amsterdam and the Wesel, set out under Gerrit Thomas Pool to chart the unknown southern coasts. Pool was killed on New Guinea eleven days into the voya...

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]]> Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/r/j/c/n/wessel-islands-wp/rjcn-wessel-islands-mapped-by-a-doomed-voyage.mp3 0:06 4 full Wessel Islands: Wealth, Loss and Wild Country https://qualla.com/wessel-islands/ Photo credit Tentotwo, CC BY-SA 3.0. Behind the navigational charm lies a darker chapter. Through the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, smallpox swept this coast, carried perhaps by Makassan trepang fishermen from the north or spreading down from the First Fleet's arrival in 1788. Whole Yolngu clans we...

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]]> Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/r/j/c/n/wessel-islands-wp/rjcn-wessel-islands-wealth-loss-and-wild-country.mp3 0:06 5 full