Dutch Australia: de Houtman or Thjissen (in 1619 and 1627 respectively) land at OTL's Perth with damaged ships, and while repairs are made decide to send an expedition up the Swan river. Going deep inland, the expedition discovers Australian sandalwood, and the VOC creates a colony at the mouth of the Swan River from which to exploit this resource.
The Dutch presence is small and concentrated; as Australian sandalwood must be dug up and dragged rather than chopped to get the bulk of usable fragrant wood, their work crews consist of Dutch overseers, African and Asian slaves to dig, Aborigine guides paid in European goods and tobacco to find copses of trees, and teams of donkeys and/or Java ponies to pull the trees.
Over the next few decades, the supply of easily-accessed sandalwood becomes exhausted. Java ponies are adopted by Aborigine tribes, dramatically changing their world and driving them to reconstitute themselves as new, creole cultures with influence from escaped slaves and renegade whites. Some of these creole peoples become pastoralists, selling sheep and cattle to the Dutch, while others remain hunter-gatherers, and dig up the more isolated and scattered sandalwood trees to drag back to the Swan river to sell.
The colony becomes more agriculturally focused, with Dutch colonists IITL splitting 50/50 between South Africa and southwestern Australia. The Noongar are conquered, and either assimilated as wage laborers or driven north and east to the creole cultures. As the Netherlands falls from power and loses European wars, the Australian colony is eventually swapped out in exchange for the return of a more profitable captured colony-perhaps a sugar-producing Caribbean Island, for example.
Some Dutch move inland, but conflict with highly mobile, well armed mounted Aborigines limits their ability to settle. The discovery of gold near Kalgoorlie, however, does drive the new colonial master to "pacify the savages", although it is not until the mid-19th century that the mounted Aborigines are brought to heel-and even then, many tribes are able to keep large tracts of semi-arid grazing land in exchange for ceding mineral rights, thus keeping their (obviously very altered from OTL) traditional way of life.
Australian gold makes the colonizer rich, but the Dutch resentful as they are locked out of power, and in the early 20th century, war begins between the Dutch and the new master as the Dutch seek to create an independent Republic of Eendrachtsland.
French South: ITTL, the colonists of Charlesfort decide to remain in South Carolina (bad weather preventing them from going south, perhaps?) long enough to buy a few beaver pelts from the local Native Americans. Fur trade starts early, with the French colonizing several areas along the coast of the southeast and buying pelts and Indian slaves from the local tribes. The Spanish burn a few forts, Indians destroy a few more, but a few survive and from them a large French population develops, fueled by refugees from the Wars of Religion. Eventually the French start to import African slaves to grow tobacco, rice, and indigo and expand westward, driving the Native Americans onto religious missions where they are protected and/or exploited by Catholic monks or French Protestant missionaries. The French presence is light on the ground, with a relatively small number of aristocrats governing vast plantations worked by African slaves, with the small space between slave and aristocrat taken up mostly by mixed-race "gens de couler libre". With a non-white majority that is at best severely discriminated against and at worse brutally repressed, it is only a matter of time until one of the perennial slave rebellions really catches fire.
Chinese Luzon: To hear the Lim Royal Family tell it, Limahong was driven to piracy because his critique of Ming corruption drove him out of polite society, and into a life of banditry. But surely, the illustrious Limahong was a well-read, well-educated Chinese man; how else can one explain his conquest of Manila Bay, where he rallied Chinese merchants and local Ilocano peoples to build a fortified state which could resist Chinese naval attacks? Oh sure, mistakes were made, such as the massacre down to the last man of Spanish prisoners when their expeditions first arrived to the region, but surely this was the result not of Limahong's leadership but of his savage Ilocano allies, who would soon peacefully acquiesce to Sinification in the interest of creating a heavenly harmony in Limahong's kingdom.
Certainly the Lim family loved China, for when the Famine Wars in the south and the Imjin War in the north caused the destabilization of the Ming in the 1590's which sent them into a fatal downward spiral, did they not send out fleets to fight rebels and the Japanese? Of course, mistakes were made, and some towns were razed and the population robbed and enslaved, but the fog of war causes such unfortunate miscommunications to occur where one gets confused about who the enemy is. Indeed, in the greatest show of loyalty, was it not the Lim family that sent their ships to the Yangtze to stop the foreign invaders there, thus saving the Ming dynasty in the south? And was it not the Lim family who pledged their men as bodyguards to the last Ming princes? And when these last Ming princes kept accidentally falling down stairs and onto knives, spears, and pistols thus ending the Ming Dynasty, was it not Lim Chen who stepped up, restoring order to southern China and claiming the mandate of Heaven for the Chinese?
Yes, it must be that the Lims were ordained by Heaven for their goodness and righteousness, saving southern China from foreign domination and granting the pearl of the South China Seas, Luzon, to the Chinese cultural sphere. It cannot be that they were a clan of desperate pirates who failed upward onto the Imperial Throne over heaps of corpses. That would just not do.
