Australia Highseas

These waters lie in the Arafura Sea, north-west of the Arnhem coast and east of the Tiwi islands, a shallow sea of tides and sandbanks. Macassan trepang fishers from Sulawesi reached the Arnhem coast in the centuries before British colonisation, bringing iron tools, cloth and tobacco to Aboriginal communities in exchange for trepang. The northern tides and winds made this shallow sea hard to navigate.