Current Research (as at 30th June 2003)
Research to date has been limited to surface visuals by private researchers with a refusal of academia to participate on political grounds. Officially, the sites do not exist. Current controversy relative to Aboriginal land claims has the Government somewhat paranoid about a possible land claim by outsiders, relative to the overwhelming evidence being uncovered of such colonies in the BC era. Academia is strictly limited in its research to Aboriginal cultures.
First brought to public awareness in 2000 by local researchers, the sites and evidence triggered off media hysteria with the facts distorted into fictions. Other sites, of course, relate and Sarina is not the epicentre but only part of the huge complex now being uncovered. The researchers fight guerilla warfare against established dogmas and political censorship with no funding and laws that prohibit private excavation, removal of artifacts and investigation of wrecks, etc.
Sarina has a population of some 10,000, is a coastal village in a rainforest climate with a recent geology of a highly complex hydrothermal metamorphosis. The coastal range bisects deserts from rich, yet narrow, strips with a vulnerable flat coast bisected by headlands and a continental shelf extending some 160 kilometres to the Great Barrier Reef. The rich sediments overlie some of the world's most ancient igneous rocks and 200 years ago, the coastal strip was solid jungle, cleared and burnt by farming practices, sugar cane and cattle raising industries prevail. Environmental mismanagement has created irreversible problems to an exquisite biota relative to the fossil hydrothermals now exposed above water.
These incredibly rich hydrothermal crusts were the attraction for colonists and sea traders beginning around 2200 BC out of the Mediterranean. The zenith of coastal mining appeared to relate to the Solomon era of 950 BC when Phoenician vessels came to the fabled land of Ophir out of the Red Sea port at Ezion-Geber on three-year voyages across oceans returning exotics to the exploding Mediterranean cultures.
Harbours
The Freshwater Point site is one of many around Australia's coastlines and it is almost an exact copy of Tyre of Phoenician legend. The east harbour jetty is a typical Phoenician loading platform of granite stone set in furnace-slag cement, some 400 metres in length by 30 metres width by 5 metres high, running back to a freshwater spring and reservoir -- one of two on the isthmus relative to adjacent to open cut mines accessing gold, copper, metacinnabar, epidote, arfedsonite, etc with associated slag heaps and artifacts with the usual Bel altars on the skyline.
In conjunction with this east harbour Sarina inlet contains walls, a cemetery, a Tanit shrine, a boatyard with launching ramp, a giant ten-acre fish traps and the usual petroglyphs.
Sarina township is built on one of the many raised tel platforms and shows clear evidence of surface and underground mining of chromite ore, copper, etc with furnace slag heaps and mining chips, ancient roads, artifacts now overbuilt by modern real estate and canefields.
Sarina's harbours dictate a Phoenician engineering and are associated with other harbours in the giant Broadsound archipelago where the engineers gave top priority to their precious ships prior to establishing operations. Aerial photographs clearly show eroded harbours and walls, reservoirs, etc relative to nearby surface and alluvial mining with quarry chip roads a very pertinent feature.
http://phoenicia.org/australia.html#Summary
