Walking along some of the beaches of north-east Arnhem Land you’ll notice, if you stop to look at your footprints, little terracotta shards.



They are remnants of the pots in which the Macassans (from the south-west corner of Sulawesi) cooked and stored the trepang they had been harvesting since the 16th century along the northern Australian coast as part of a sophisticated trade arrangement with the Yolngu custodians.

The Macassan praus arrived annually on the north-east winds, just ahead of the monsoon, and turned around in the dry, their hulls filled with cooked, sundried trepang – also known as bêche-de-mer or sea cucumber – to meet the rapacious demands of an Asian market that regarded the phallus-shaped slug as an aphrodisiac delicacy.

The Macassans traded iron, tobacco, cloth and gin for access to Yolngu waters. They also brought Islam, which found note in the songlines centuries before the missionaries introduced the true locals to God. The Macassans and Yolngu partnered and had children.



Trove opens a window to 370,000,000-plus items, including books, photographs, maps, databases, letters, diaries and much else besides.

Everything changed in the 20th century when whitefella governments decided they, not the Yolngu, should benefit from the trepang trade. The Macassans were excluded while the Japanese and hordes of white fortune hunters were allowed in.



The Japanese and white carpetbaggers did not afford the Yolngu the same respect that the Macassans had. The intruders raped the Yolngu women, enslaved and beat the young men and murdered many, regardless of gender or age.



The Yolngu retaliated, prompting talk in Canberra of a large-scale, disproportionate military reprisal against them.



Enter a cast of intriguing characters – including the anthropologist and adventurer Donald Thomson, who brokered what amounts, perhaps, to the only peace treaty between an Australian government and an Indigenous people – and you have a story that Australia might like to hear.



My head has been in these events for a while now. And many of the voices that might bring it to life in any piece of extended writing are here at my fingertips, thanks to the National Library of Australia’s Trove – a type of digital aggregator that pulls together historical material from sources, including other institutions, all over Australia.



Trove has been a rich source of material for several of my books, as it is proving to be for the one now under construction.



And so, through Trove’s archived newspapers, I’ve found Harry – the mission boy who saw the Japanese at Caledon Bay imprison women, girls and old men in the trepang smokehouse, before raping the women in the bush. The boy remembered the older men “discussing the matter, some advising killing and cutting up the Japanese”.



They went to work on the Japanese with their shovel-nosed spears, Japan protested, and the government, accordingly, talked about sending in the troops. It’s an interesting digression (one you’ll also find mention of in Trove) that the Japanese were also mapping the coast from fishing boats for potential future invasion.



Countless writers, historians, academics, genealogists and amateur and professional researchers are engaged, variously, in telling the stories of Australia with the help of Trove and the window it opens on to 370,000,000-plus items, including books, photographs, maps, databases, letters, diaries and much else besides.



Yes, Trove has become a fundamental platform for history’s raw material. But it is also a great democratiser of information that might once have been consigned solely to the reading and microfiche rooms of state and national institutions, inaccessible to many people in remote and regional Australia or, indeed, in other parts of the world.



Professional writers and historians are now side by side with amateurs as they connect to Trove via the world wide web. It is a timesaving godsend for us all. But Trove users, meanwhile, give back in droves by correcting the transcripts of material – for example, difficult-to-read copies of newspapers – in its collection.



I research and correct as I go where I can. Trove is free to its users. But many reciprocate. In this, Trove is beautifully symbiotic, not to mention economically efficient.



This is important because Trove’s capacity to do what it does is under threat from budget cuts (governments fallaciously call them “efficiency dividends”) that will take some $6m from the National Library’s operations over coming years.



The library has already shed many staff – skilled and dedicated people who were committed to the institution’s function as national memory. The funding cut will necessarily impact on Trove’s reach into new collections and the continued digitisation of material already in its orbit.



We invest governments with the confidence to make spending decisions. And they do – like increasing defence spending to 2% of GDP so that Australia might “invest” $50bn in 12 new submarines, while cutting $20m from national collecting institutions in the arts portfolio.



The latest cuts (from which the Australian War Memorial has been quarantined) do seem to be predicated on a false premise that the corner of the arts represented by the national institutions is somehow for the elite.



Nothing could be further from the truth. And nothing illustrates this better than the great digital democracy that is Trove.



The federal government is discovering this to its peril. Contributing users, the well known and lesser so, have taken to social media en masse to defend their treasure.



They are angry, their number is growing and they will not go away. Their message to Malcolm Turnbull and his government is simple: #fundTrove.



The campaign has only just begun.