late 1940s. In his work on their mythic traditions, published in 1952 he wrote: Berndt added that similar to the Makassan trepang fishermen in Australia known to the historians, the Baijini of the Djanggawul myth are said to be "cooking trepang, where the tamarind trees stand to-day". Tamarind trees are thought to have been introduced to Australia by the Makassans. According to interpretations of the legends, the Baijini not only built stone houses (balapathu) but also cultivated rice paddies. The following year. the sinologist C.P. FitzGerald mentioned the possibility of pre-European Chinese visits to Australia in an article, which conjecture a possible early Chinese presence in northern Australia, by mentioning a Chinese statue which had been dug up in 1879 near Darwin. Baijini and Shou lao 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