The Dutch East India Company ship Batavia struck Morning Reef off Western Australia in June 1629. A group led by Jeronimus Cornelisz subsequently murdered more than one hundred survivors while the commander sought help. Rescue brought trials and executions, making the episode one of Australia's most notorious early colonial encounters.

The wreck inspired poems, verse dramas and historical works that explore isolation, fanaticism and the collapse of social order. Australian poets have also used Batavia to question triumphal narratives of European arrival and to evoke the ancient, already inhabited landscape surrounding the wreck.