I don't know, les, but I know that language is like culture - someone travels and they bring their words and ideas with them. For example, Bathurst and Melville Islands are known as the Tiwi Islands, populated by the Tiwi peoples. Melville Island was the home of the Tiwi Aborigines (it is now an Aboriginal Reserve) for thousands of years. In 1644 Abel Tasman became the first European to officially sight the island although he incorrectly assumed that it was part of the northern coast of Australia.

In 1818 Phillip Parker King, the son of NSW Governor Philip Gidley King, explored the island. King found to his surprise that the Aborigines knew some Portuguese words suggesting that they had made contact with Portuguese sailors and that a Portuguese ship had possibly been wrecked nearby.

There is also some evidence that ...it appears that the Portuguese Captain Christovao de Mendonça could have led his fleet of caravels down the east coast of Australia in 1522, sailing south as far as today's Warnambool and mapping the coast as he went... (McIntyre, K. G. (1982). The Secret Discovery of Australia. Sydney: Picador.)

this evidence is reinforced by the fact that there are Portuguese words in some Aboriginal languages on the west coast of Australia, suggesting that some sailors stayed and were accepted into the local tribal communities. (Brandenstein, C. von, (1970), Portuguese loanwords in Aboriginal languages of northwestern Australia: a problem of Indo-European and Finno-Ugrian comparative linguistics, in Wurm, S. & D. Laycock (eds), Pacific linguistic studies in honour of Arthur Capell, Pacific Linguistics, Series C-13, pp. 617-50)

freda