Fitzgerald's allusion was a figurine which had been dug up 4 feet down among the roots of a
banyan tree by Chinese natives, under the direction of a Public Works superintendent, Mr. Strawbridge, who was overseeing the clearance of dense jungle for the construction of a road at a site called Doctor's Gully in
Palmerston just outside of the town of
Darwin in 1879. The gully leads down to a sandy cove, and is one of the two sites where fresh water can be found in Darwin. The figurine was mounted on an animal, identified as either a
gazelle or
antelope. It came into the possession of
Thomas Worsnop who reproduced a drawing of it in his 1897 work on Aboriginal arts and manufactures. Worsnop described it as fashioned from a type of
jade, though later scholars have stated it is made of
soapstone, and stated that all inquiries he had made to determine what it represented had failed to clarify its origin. Eventually, In a paper read before the Royal Society of South Australia on 8 March 1928, Norman Tindale identified it as a Chinese deity from the
Tang dynasty, a high backdating which elicited Fitzgerald's skepticism. The deity in question, associated with
Canopus, is the
Old Man of the South Pole,
Shòu lǎo, (壽老), the Chinese god of longevity who was one of the
Sānxīng, or three
stellar deities, in Chinese religion.
Peter Worsley took up Fitzgerald's remark in 1955, making a succinct synthesis of the overall scholarship regarding pre-European contacts with northern Australia. In his essay, he mentioned the Baijini myths current among the Yolngu: In eastern Arnhem Land, moreover, the aborigines are quite categorical in their statements that the Macassarese were preceded another people they term the Baijini. These people were different from the later Macassarese, though like the Macassarese, they came for the purpose of collecting trepang, a sea-slug which abounds in the shallow waters off the Arnhem Land coast.. The Baijini had an advanced technology: they possessed hand-looms, were agriculturalists, and built huts during their stays in Australia. One of the more interesting comments made about the Baijini is a reference to their light-coloured skins. Whilst it is possible that these people may have been Chinese, the trade in trepang was usually carried out by non-Chinese, the Chinese middlemen coming into the picture at
Koepang and other such markets. Fitzgerald suggests that any Chinese voyages would most likely have been scientific and exploratory expeditions rather than trading expeditions. The Baijini, then, may have been another Indonesian people, and not necessarily Chinese.' J.V.G. Mills, in a note to a translation of a
Ming dynasty account by
Ma Huan concerning Chinese voyages at that time, suggested that if, of the many Asian people whose visits might have engendered a legend about the Baijini, they were Chinese, the likely explanation would be that it referred to some vessel detached from the fleet of
Zheng He, which would have sailed south from
Timor. ==Modern theories==