In 1606, the Duyfken sailed from the Dutch trading post at Bantam in Java, under the command of Willem Janszoon, searching for trade and for gold rumored to lie to the south. Following the New Guinea coast, the crew crossed unknowingly to the western shore of Cape York and made landfall near the modern town of Weipa, at a river Janszoon named R. met het Bosch, the river with the bush, now called the Pennefather. It was the first authenticated European landing on the Australian continent, 164 years before James Cook charted the east coast. The Dutch found the land low, hot and, to their eyes, unpromising. They had no idea they had touched the shore of a continent the size of Europe.

This first meeting of two worlds turned to bloodshed. As the Duyfken worked south down the coast, Janszoon's crew came into contact with the Wik people, the Traditional Owners of that country, and the encounter collapsed into violence. By accounts of the voyage, the Dutch attempted to seize people, and the Wik defended their country fiercely; around nine of Janszoon's men were killed. The Dutch turned back at a headland they named Cape Keerweer, which means "turn again" or "turn back." The name is an honest confession in the language of the men who fled. The very first chapter of recorded contact between Europeans and Aboriginal Australians was not discovery but trespass, met with resistance.

Long before and ever since the Duyfken, this has been Aboriginal country. The land around Duyfken Point and north toward Mapoon is the country of Uradhi-speaking peoples, including the Angkamuthi, whose traditional lands take in the mouth of the Ducie River and the coast running north along Port Musgrave. Theirs is one of many languages of the Western Cape, a coast where saltwater peoples have fished, hunted and lived for tens of thousands of years. The Dutch named a point and sailed away. The Angkamuthi and their neighbours stayed, as they had always been, custodians of a shoreline that European maps could label but never truly possess.

The point owes its name not to the Dutch but to an Englishman. On 8 November 1802, Matthew Flinders, then circumnavigating and charting Australia in a methodical sweep, marked this feature on the western Cape and named it for the Duyfken, honoring the ship that had come this way almost two centuries before him. It is a quiet act of historical memory, one mariner tipping his hat across the years to another. Today the point is a low spit of sand and mangrove on the Gulf of Carpentaria, with little to see and everything to remember, the place where the recorded story of Europeans in Australia begins, with a small ship, a misread coast, and a coast that was never empty.