DAVID TURNBULL continues his series of profiles of Canberrans with a story. This column focuses on a remarkable Dutch migrant who has built bridges between the country he grew up in and the country he now calls home.

Peter Reynders is exactly the type of migrant Australia needs. Born in the Netherlands in 1942, he migrated to Australia in the 1960s in search of a new life.

Married to an Australian, and now a citizen himself, he loves Australia with a passion.

He’s never lost his love for the country he grew up in, but he’ll tell you he’s as much an Aussie now as he is Dutch.

“I’ve spent about half a century here,” he says. “My wife’s Australian, my daughter and sons were born here. This is home.”

When he first arrived, he worked as a waiter in Kings Cross, then as a ceiling fixer on the Sydney Opera House.

He then studied full time to gain a town planning degree from the University of NSW. His thesis focused on sand mining restoration and he soon joined the state government’s first environmental planning team for the Hunter region.

After adding a graduate diploma in local government management to his CV, he spent the next 40 years working for councils in Maitland, Lismore, the Snowy River Shire and Queanbeyan.

The thing that sets Peter apart is the bridge he’s built between the country he grew up in and the country he now calls home.

“Look, I’ve spent more of my life here, but all my education as a child was in the Netherlands… the language, the history, the architecture, the land use, everything.”

The Dutch were part of the post-World War II immigration explosion in Australia, but they were never high profile, like the English, the Irish, or the Italians.

At school, Peter learned the first European to set foot on Australian soil was a Dutchman.

But in 2002 an article in a historical society newsletter about the 1606 voyage by a Dutch East India Company mariner named Willem Janszoon and his landing near what is now Weipa on the west coast of Cape York piqued his interest.

The article was written by an Australian-born historian of Dutch heritage named Rupert Gerritsen. So Peter rang him and said that with the 400th anniversary of Janszoon’s voyage due in 2006 they should organise some commemoration. Rupert agreed.

Peter and Rupert weren’t motivated to honour the Dutch alone. They saw the Janszoon voyage as the first step of a multi-national effort at discovery.

“We formed a not-for-profit organisation called Australia on the Map – 1606-2006 and our aim was to commemorate that first voyage but also educate people about not just the English version of history, but all the mariners who’d ‘discovered’ Australia,” Peter says. 

In October 1606, Portuguese mariner Luis Vaez De Torres was the first European to sail through the strait that now bears his name.

In October 1616, Dirk Hartog was the first to step on to the west coast of Australia, landing at what is now Cape Inscription, near Shark Bay. 

On November 24, 1642, another Dutch East India Company mariner named Abel Tasman sighted the west coast of Tasmania, then charted half the island before bearing north-east to discover NZ (coincidentally named after a locality in The Netherlands)

And, of course, as we’ve all been taught, on April 29, 1770, James Cook landed in Botany Bay. 

The French connection came in 1811 when Louis Clarde De Saulces de Freycinet published the first complete map of the Australian coastline.

For four years, Peter Reynders and Rupert Gerritsen met every Thursday at Bookplate – the café at the National Library. They set up state-based working committees to plan celebrations.

When 2006 rolled around the Australian, the Dutch, the French and the Portuguese governments had all supported the commemoration financially. 

“Only one government didn’t support us,” Peter says. “The English government.” 

Gala dinners were held in Australia and the Netherlands, commemorative ceremonies were conducted, monuments were built in key locations, and a replica of Janszoon’s ship, the Duyfken, that had been built in Fremantle years earlier, sailed to Cairns to mark the occasion.

In Canberra, a Willem Janszoon monument was installed in a park in Griffith that already carried his name. 

Not surprisingly, Peter and Rupert Gerritsen were both awarded Dutch honours for fostering so much goodwill between our countries.

All that work, of course, was voluntary, not for money, but for love.

“We only wanted to educate people about the true history and to celebrate all the mariners involved, whatever their nationality,” says Peter. 

There are footprints all through Peter’s life that underline his enthusiasm to build positive links.

He was an early member of the Canberra Dutch Club, and for years a regular contributor to the Dutch Courier, a monthly Dutch Australian paper published in Melbourne.

His most recent volunteer project was to translate 724 letters to English by a Dutch-born painter named Jan Hendrik Scheltema.

Again, simply recognising a Dutch-sounding surname sparked Peter’s interest. 

He started researching Scheltema and discovered that after migrating to Australia in 1888 he’d become well-known in Melbourne art circles with work exhibited alongside luminary Australian painters such as Charles Conder, Arthur Streeton, Tom Roberts and Frederick McCubbin.

Hungry for more information, Peter contacted the National Bureau for the Documentation of Art History (in the Hague), and got copies of letters the artist had sent home to family, and a name for what was thought to be a surviving great nephew – Dr Casimir Jeekel.

Like a detective unravelling a complex whodunnit, Peter recognised the name was rare and made long-distance calls to all 20 of the Jeekels listed in the Dutch white pages.

On the 19th call he located Dr Jeekel’s stepson who that day had been clearing out a house he’d inherited and had found boxes full of letters and some paintings.

Peter decided on the spot to “visit his family” and, after meeting the sole surviving relative, was given the letters and offered 19 original Scheltema paintings.

“The young man was an artist himself, and he understood that Scheltema was a part of Australian art history,” says Peter.

“He said he would give the paintings to me if I could find a gallery in Australia that would give them a home.

“And that’s what I did.”

On his return, Peter noticed the Gippsland Art Gallery in Sale, Victoria, had just purchased a Scheltema painting for $36,000.

Were they interested?

Absolutely.

The end result? 

An exhibition at the gallery in 2020 entitled The Lost Impressionist.

This entire detective saga was undertaken voluntarily with the dual motive of curiosity and a desire to foster the link between the two countries in Peter’s heart.

This time, though, he was forced to accept one of the paintings for his efforts, albeit under duress.

He would only accept the smallest painting, which now hangs in his study.

It is a rural scene from now suburban, then rural Alphington, in Melbourne, and features an enormous eucalypt with a Hereford steer dwarfed at its trunk.

In a letter over 100 years ago the artist told his family: “…such old eucalypts that had survived the ring-barking, the fires and the clearing are ‘monuments’ from before white settlement.”

Journalist David Turnbull is writing a series of profiles about interesting Canberrans. Do you know someone we’ve never heard of? Share the name in an email to David via editor@citynews.com.au