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Old news (~2013). Australian Geographic had a feature on it years ago. Here's one of their articles: https://www.australiangeographic.com.au/topics/history-cultu...

Apparently they also found Chinese coins https://www.australiangeographic.com.au/news/2014/08/18th-ce...

Personally, having studied Chinese history, travelled the area fairly extensively, and read all of the Ming Dynasty texts around Zheng He's voyages (~1400s), I am sort of convinced it would have been unthinkable for the Chinese not to have visited northern Australia, since (a) presence of land should have been well known / established through local knowledge, currents, clouds, winds, and seabird migrations; (b) they went to so many other places, it seems insane they would stop just after the equator when they already had compass-aided navigation and strong (for the period) navigational astronomy. Still, stranger things have happened...

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Wouldn't it be odd for the Ming fleet to have "found" Australia, but not have left surviving documentation?

Is suppose they mightn't have realized the size of Australia.

Manuscripts had to be copied, and the copyists were Confucians who, as a class, had little interest in such things.

That or it may not have seemed like a valuable trade route. Trade requires both sides to have something the other wants that’s also worth transporting the distance.

It's new to me! I'm one of the lucky 10,000

Edit: From a brief skim of the OP article, this is about a new coin found and references the five coins found in your article. I've only skimmed the articles though so they may be referencing the same thing

This was my first thought as well. Zheng He did not reach Australia, based on what I know of the Chinese sources, but that doesn't mean that is not the source of the coins, as he famously paid for tribute. He was definitely in what is now Indonesia. Northern Australian aboriginal tribes have traded with Indonesia for centuries so a find of this nature shouldn't really be that surprising although it is definitely interesting.

Likewise Indian and East African sailors. They traded extensively with Indonesia. If you look at the map, it is hard to imagine anyone trading with Indonesia not stumbling upon Northern Australia.

there's a fascinating audio book called 1434 putting together a pretty convincing argument that many of the European "discoveries" where predated by Chinese.

http://www.gavinmenzies.net/

> pretty convincing argument

I read the printed version of the book and found the nature and quality of the argument to fall somewhere between von Daniken ("we don't know exactly how the ancients built the pyramids, so it must have been aliens") and Thor Heyerdahl ("I can sail this thing so Polynesians must have come from Peru").

Also, noone really cares if some lone Chinese sailor "discovered" America, or some other land, if the knowledge about this discovery was lost. The reason Columbus is considered the one to discover America is because him landing on America's shores started a new era in history, not because he was first human there (there were Native Americans there, after all).

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