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Searching For Wouter: The Story of Australia's First White Settler

Indie Reader Approved 4 Star Rating:
Jan Andersen’s SEARCHING FOR WOUTER: The Story of Australia's First White Settler is a bold, meticulously researched work of historical fiction that resurrects one of Australia’s most overlooked colonial mysteries. It is an ambitious entry that rewards patient readers with genuine literary and historical depth.

When a Dutch vessel crashes onto the Australian coast in 1629, two convicted mutineers are marooned on the continent’s shore and vanish from the historical record. Told through the voices of six narrators across four centuries, from the ship herself to a 21st-century historian, this novel pieces together what history overlooked.

What do you do with a history that nobody taught you?

Jan Andersen’s novel takes that question seriously. Set across nearly four centuries of Western Australian coastline, SEARCHING FOR WOUTER: The Story of Australia's First White Settler attempts something that most historical novelists would avoid: telling one story through six completely different voices that are centuries apart, using period-specific speech and worldviews for all of them, and basing the narrative on a real historical mystery. The fact that it works is a genuine achievement.

In 1629, the Dutch VOC vessel Batavia wrecked on the Houtman Abrolhos reef off the Western Australian coast. Two convicted mutineers, Wouter Loos and Jan Pelgrom, were subsequently marooned on the continent’s shore. What happened to them? History went quiet.

Wouter Loos—quietly devout, attuned to some spiritual frequency the other men around him lack—is set against Jeronimus Corneliusz, the under-merchant whose chapters unfold as a darkly funny, self-incriminating confession. These two figures create moral conflict, with Jeronimus genuinely believing his worst acts are reasonable responses to the circumstances.

The ship herself narrates the opening chapters, speaking with a voice that is maternal and weary. Early in the novel, she watches the ship’s incompetent skipper dismiss the warning lights on the reef (distracted by thoughts of a young maid), and remarks: “I know everything that happens on my deck and within my hull. People think they can keep secrets from each other, but they cannot keep them from me.” The ship’s omniscience lets Andersen transition smoothly between such intimate scenes as Wouter desperately praying while in a precarious situation to a more wide-angled perspective that reveals the plotting of evil schemes.

Later chapters follow explorer George Grey (1839) and anthropologist Daisy Bates (1910) across the same coastline, hunting for traces of Dutch presence. Bates is sharp, opinionated, socially awkward in precisely the way a woman needed to be in colonial Australia to be taken seriously. Bates develops an unexpected warmth with a young Aboriginal woman named Mary, and their relationship carries more emotional weight than anything in the Grey sections. The final chapter is deliberately quieter, more procedural. While it provides necessary grounding, it feels a little underpowered and a bit anticlimactic after the sweep of everything before it.

Although various works have been written on the topic, SEARCHING FOR WOUTER stands out for its unique narrative approach. The Indigenous experience is seen only through European eyes, but this limitation is handled with honesty and moral attentiveness. Andersen writes with evident passion, and the extensive bibliography signals the research done.

Jan Andersen’s SEARCHING FOR WOUTER: Australia's First White Settler is a bold, meticulously researched work of historical fiction that resurrects one of Australia’s most overlooked colonial mysteries. It is an ambitious entry that rewards patient readers with genuine literary and historical depth.

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Biography

Jan Andersen is the author of Searching For Wouter: The Story of Australia’s First White Settler. His second novel, To Kill or Not to Kill, is due for release in early 2027. Jan Andersen studied Arts/Law at Monash University (Melbourne) and has a Masters in Creative Writing from Macquarie University (Sydney). You can sign up to get updates about their writing here.

In 2006, whilst visiting the WA Shipwrecks Museum in Fremantle, Western Australia, I inadvertently placed my hands upon the ancient timbers of the hull of the Dutch retourship, The Batavia. This is arguably one of the most notorious of all the Dutch shipwrecks along the coast of Australia. Shipwrecked on the reef, a hour’s sail from Geraldton, The Batavia struck reef in the winter of 1629. In the ensuing three months, while waiting for a rescue ship, mutineers raped and murdered 150 people, including children.

My hotel was a short walk from the museum, situated right on the boat harbour, and my window opened out onto the vast Indian Ocean, the place of many shipwrecks just like the Batavia. The moon was full, and it cast it’s silvery pathy along the ocean into my window. That night I had a nightmare. I dreamed there was an evil force, hidden, trying to remain secret, behind a large wooden door, behind which untold attrocities were happening. I awoke in a sweat and went into the bathroom. It was then I saw what others later jokingly described as a stigmata on my left forehead, just over the eyebrow. A browny-red mark, the shape of a crucifix, had appeared. My initial remark, ‘What the hell?’ In the morning it was more pronounced, and earned it’s fanciful name from my wife.

I am not prone to nightmares. And I am definitely not prone to religious phenomena.

I didn’t realise until later that I had connected with a recorded memory, embedded in those ancient timbers of The Batavia. Today, I reaslise that memory can be recorded in many ways. Just as we record photos on film, or sounds and images on our silicon chips, so can memory be recorded in many places. In walls of a house, for example. We glimpse or feel something. This memory is recorded in places where strong emotional events have occurred. In the walls of houses (thus the “haunted house”) and within the timbers of old ships.

The story of The Batavia would not leave me alone. I had never heard of it before that chance encounter in 2006. I slowly began sourcing every available book and article on the subject, some of them privately printed. The story had hold of me. For it was here I learned that a 24 year-old soldier, Wouter Loos, was set ashore at Hutt River, thereby becoming Australia’s first white settler.

Years later, in 2017, I started writing. As soon as I began, I remembered something long forgotten. I forgot that I wrote a novella at the age of 13. It was a vampire story. Then at age 16 I won a short story competition. Then I stopped writing. I decided to be sensible. I went to university to study Arts/Law. In 2017 I finally picked up my pen once more.....(continued in the blog section)

In 2006, whilst visiting the WA Shipwrecks Museum in Fremantle, Western...

Books

Searching For Wouter: The Story of Australia’s First White Settler

To Kill or Not to Kill