Chapter Forty.
Conclusion
Mayan Colonists of Australasia
Near Uaxactun, Mexico is the ancient Mayan city of Tikal, where stand five steep pyramids, the tallest measuring 69m high. Very similar towering narrow pyramids topped with shrines reminiscent of those of the Mayans, exist at the ancient Khumer city of Angkor Vat in Cambodia. At Palenque, pictures of a large cross were discovered on a wall of one temple-pyramid now named “Temple of the Cross”. These pictures are almost identical to the “Tree of Heaven” depicted upon temple walls on Java, where there are also burial tombs reminiscent of Mayan examples.
Javanese temple art also describes a sea monster similar to the Mayan fire-snake and also porches occur bearing engraved figures of monsters, lotus flower walls, and a cross-shaped “holy arch” like those found in the Mayan cities of Palenque; Tikal and elsewhere, dating to 600 AD.
Further evidence of certain Mayan colonisation came to light in 1945 when an Australian soldier, Bill Morgan of Sydney, New South Wales, stumbled upon a 90m high stone stepped pyramid containing Mayan-style glyphs covered in dense jungle growth, on Bougainville Island in the Solomons group. Five more stepped pyramids were found, erected close together in the Eastern Sepik jungle of Papua New Guinea in 1948, and a number of apparent Mayan jade artefacts were found nearby by a local European plantation owner.
The “Great West Land” which they also knew as Uru was known to the Mayans as a land of gold, that possessed the “Great Egg of Creation” at its centre; the egg out of which all life first arose. Tradition said it shone like gold, but was drawn red in artwork, the colour of the West, and of the dead to the Maya; for here dwelt the spirits of the dead in the “lost paradise” of the west. There seems little doubt that the “Great Egg of Creation” was Ayers Rock/Uluru.
Mayan explorers must have penetrated Australia’s interior to return home with tales of the wondrous sights and strange animals they had seen there, as we shall see anon.
Because of our never-ending field investigations and expeditions, which continue to take us to just about every remote corner of Australia and New Zealand, Heather and I have often been dubbed either “Mr and Mrs Crocodile Dundee” or “Mr and Mrs Indiana Jones”, and what with all the adventures we have we certainly live up to these titles. However, the tale about to unfold, of snake and crocodile-infested swamps and rivers, and jungle-covered Mayan ruins, we realise, sounds like the scenario for another Indiana Jones movie!
It is said that the gods only give their love to those who demand the impossible, and in the course of our searches together all these years, we have achieved this, for we have uncovered fantastic ruins and relics of a history that conservative, university-confined ‘experts’ would prefer that nobody knew anything about, and there have certainly been attempts to prevent the following discoveries from reaching the Australian media.
During October 2000 Heather and I carried out yet another field expedition in Queensland’s Far North during which we uncovered further relics of ancient Bronze-Age Egypto-Phoenician colonisation evidence. It was while searching the Cooktown district in the vicinity of the Endeavour River that we stumbled upon grass and shrubbery-covered piles of crude stones, the remains of collapsed man-made structures.
As it was late Spring and Taipans were about, we were reluctant to venture into the thick grass for a closer inspection. This would have to wait until the winter months of 2003.
However, projecting from the dry, dusty ground on the edge of some stonework, beside a track I spotted a curiously shaped slab of orangey-coloured sandstone. The bad drought at that time had dried the soil, so that winds had blown away much topsoil exposing the stone, which was easily removed.
Brushing dried mud from the stone I realised I was looking at faded engravings on both sides of the slab. One side bore the image of a reclining human figure, a bowl held between the right hand and bent leg. A tear extended out from the right eye of this face-on figure, and saliva was depicted flowing from the right side of the mouth. Another tear was depicted above the head, and on the other side of the stone to the right was the image of an eye with a tear dropping from the left side, and below this, the image of a snake with two eyes, a tear coming from its right eye.
The human figure however immediately reminded me of other, more elaborate images, carved in the round of the Mayan god of rain, Chac Mool. Yet the Mayan culture arose in far away Mexico, Guatemala and areas of Belize around 2000 BC. What was a Mayan idol doing here at Cooktown, we wondered?
The slab measured 41.5cm length by 24.5cm tall and was 7cm in thickness. Its weathered state showed it to be of great age, certainly pre-dating European arrival. It appeared obvious to us that the nearby crumbling stonework and this relic were links in a ghostly chain stretching out across the Pacific Ocean to the Americas.
In July 2003 on our most ambitious pre-Cook Queensland field investigation yet undertaken we were back in Cooktown. We had already uncovered a good many relics pointing to Bronze-Age Middle-Eastern colonisation further south, but what we unknowingly were about to uncover at the Cooktown ‘Mayan’ site was to stand out as one of our most important finds yet, for it has opened another chapter on the ‘unwritten’ history of Australian discovery and exploration, by ancient drift-current explorers from the Americas.
In the vicinity of the earlier Chac Mool idol find, on a jungle-covered rise, I came upon several small ironstone slabs bearing unmistakable Phoenician letterings. These turned out to be votive offering requests to Baal, from a shrine which once stood hereabouts long before the arrival of the Mayans, by which time the Middle-East colonists had vanished.