Portsmouth's importance to the white settlement/seizure of Australia excludes a previous settlement of whites on what is today Australian territory, the temporary, unintended, and unfortunate enforced settlement lasting several tortured and terrible months on the Abrolhos Islands off the coast of what is now Western Australia. These unwilling settlers, at least as unwilling as the unfortunates later exiled to New South Wales, were mostly from the Netherlands, being survivors of the wreck of the then most powerful ship in the world, the mighty Dutch ship Batavia.
Two of the gang who caused most of the other survivors their almost unbelievable sufferings were very arguably lucky not to be put through the same punishments meted out to the other brutes and their almost certainly psychopathic leader, being exiled to mainland Australia. These two exiles may have survived or not, we know nothing definite about them, although we know both of other whites who were lucky to be taken into the care of a group of First Australians, and others who were killed almost out-of-hand.
If they survived, then only they, the brutally slaughtered corpses of their gang's many victims, and the corpses of their rather brutally executed fellow gang members could possibly be called "permanent".
This isn't the place for the story of the Batavia, or the extremes of human behaviour exhibited around the Abrolhos Islands during that time, both truly evil and truly heroic, except to note it was not First Australians who raped, tortured, and murdered these poor souls, but a ghastly gang of ghouls led by a dodgy white Dutch bloke who was one of those truly evil psychopaths usually only dreamed up by novelists with particularly perverted minds and whose work is never published because it's just too unbelievable, unless it's the script for a James Bond movie. Check the tale out ... if you dare!
One final comment for your consideration. The experiences of the white victims of their white antagonists were not at all dissimilar from the experiences of many of the First Australian victims of the later mostly white, mostly British invaders of their lands. And of course it would never have occurred to either group of christian whites, neither the Dutch victims and their rapists, torturers, and murderers, nor the later British torturers, rapists, and murderers of the First Australians, that their society was anything but the very peak of human civilisation, and people who lived as did the First Australians were far below the very bottom rung on the ladder to the peaks of their own civilisation.
I'll bet this poor bloke didn't expect his bones to be on public view in a museum. He was a Batavia murder victim, dug up on Beacon Island in 1963. He was about 1.8 metres tall (a very big man for the time - but his size did him no good when faced with a group of men caught in a rage of what appears, at least on the surface, to be ongoing psychopathic insanity), and aged between 35-39. He was probably killed by a hefty whack on the head from a cutting implement, probably a sword or axe, but he also has a broken shoulder bone and is missing a foot. (Photo: Guy de la Bedoyere)
Replica of the Batavia
Image of fighting on West Wallabi Island (aka Wiebbe Hayes Island), the location of the fort built by one of the heroes of this awful tale, Wiebbe Hayes. Here, Wiebbe was responsible for the construction in 1629 of his stone fort, the oldest known extant European construction on Austraiian soil. (Plate 3 from the 1647 edition of the Dutch work "Ongeluckige voyagie, van't schip Batavia" ["Unlucky voyage of the ship Batavia"] by Francisco Pelsaert [another hero of the Batavia wreck, who died in 1630, but whose journals were used for this work] and J. Vliet. The drawing on which this plate is based is usually said to be by either Francisco Pelsaert or Jan Jansz.)
Wiebbe Hayes's nearly 400 year old fort (Photo: The late, great, always interesting Rupert Gerritsen)
The red marker is on West Wallabi Island. The marked exile location is around the mouth of Hutt River, identified by Rudolf Gerritsen as the most likely of several possible locations of the offloading of the two mutineers.