Afghan Camel Strings and the Australian Outback

It was a great monopoly and stretched from Holland to Asia - namely Batavia (Jakarta), where the Dutch United East India Company (VOC) headquarters was established - and the surrounding countries, a source of great wealth, provided access to copper, tin, spices, opium and dyes, these being some of the basic requisites of commerce.From the Cape of Good Hope to Batavia the ships would travel due west for one thousand Dutch miles before turning north, there being no means by which to accurately determine longitude at sea: This becomes the accepted method of voyage, to seek the sight of land and then head north towards the coast of Sumatra. For almost a hundred years some were lucky enough to cast their eyes upon a great mass of land, thought to have been a part of New Guinea.The Zuytdorp departs the Cape of Good Hope, Table Bay, with the ship Kockenge. She pulls ahead of the Kockenge due to her being a much larger and faster vessel. The captain sails until sighting land before turning north for Batavia, making full benefit of the winds. But catastrophe is all they meet, no success in voyage to be celebrated. The Zuytdorp is shipwrecked.There is evidence to show that Aboriginals of the Shark Bay area suffer from Porphyria Variegate, a gene mutation that is traceable to the Dutch. It is uncommon and rare, and there is no reason, other than the coupling of an Aboriginal with a survivor of the Zuytdorp, that currently explains the disease being discovered in Australian Aboriginals of WA. I do not declare this to be fact nor fiction: take it as you will.

One of the many military events not widely recalled each year is the Kibeho Massacre, where a massacre of over 10,000 Internally Displaced Persons occurred, twelve months after the Rwandan genocide which saw upwards of 1,000,000 slaughtered.The Australian contingent that was on the ground at the time comprised a miniscule number of professionals when accounting for the overall number of 120,000 IDPs situated in the camp at Kibeho: for those that can recall, it was here that the Virgin Mary did appear, and in 2001 Kibeho was added to the list of approved Marian apparition sites.What you read here is based on actual events, occurring between April 17th and May 9th, 1995.During the deployment of Australian Infantry to Rwanda, whose main task was to provide security for the contingent, many a variety of task was met: carrying stretchers through the AUSMED hospital, escorting dental technicians, medics, and other specialised personnel through the winding hills of this land-locked country, and conducting security pickets on key installations to which were their sole responsibility. They never expected to be confronted by the slaughter of more than 10,000 men, women, children and babies. The basic infantryman was trained and prepared more for a situation as that presented by Vietnam, scaled down versions of the Falkland War and Somalia, or even a prolonged campaign against highly trained foes. But in Rwanda... no one could fathom that their worst nightmare may actually bear its rancid fruit of toxicity.