by Tony Horwitz
He found it easier to talk about the environmental change since Cook’s day. The owner of Alpha Farm was declared “lunatick” in 1828; the settlers who followed him were demonstrably so. If cool, damp New Zealand seemed a mirror of Britain, much of Australia—thirty times the size of the U.K.—represented its opposite: dry and harsh, with only 6 percent of its land arable. Yet colonists at Botany Bay, and across Australia, imported English notions of land management to terrain that was horribly ill suited to European husbandry and agriculture.
Kurnell’s settlers introduced 13,000 sheep, most of which quickly died of foot rot. Cattle followed, overgrazing the peninsula’s scrub. Loggers felled the fine stands of timber that Cook had admired. Stripped of vegetation, Kurnell became a waste of shifting sands, so duny and desolate that it would later serve as a set for movies about desert warfare, as well as the postnuclear fantasy Mad Max—Beyond Thunderdome.
In the late nineteenth century, the ravaged peninsula was also designated a zone for “noxious trades” needed by the nearby city: tanneries, wool-scouring mills, sewerage works. In the twentieth century, when Sydney Harbour acquired its famed bridge and Opera House, Botany Bay got an airport, chemical plants, and oil refineries. “On cloudy, humid days, it feels like you’re sitting behind a diesel bus,” John said of the fumes.
The refineries and sewage works dumped waste straight into the bay and ocean, making Kurnell’s beach the most polluted in greater Sydney. As a final insult, sand-mining companies carted off dunes wholesale and dug below sea level, extracting sand for construction sites and filling the holes with demolition waste. “People have tried everything they can on the peninsula,” John said, “so it’s gotten to the point where they’re just digging it up and hauling it away.”
In 1770, Cook wrote of Australia: “We see this Country in the pure state of Nature, the Industry of Man has had nothing to do with any part of it.” Two hundred and thirty years later, Botany Bay—a name Cook intended as a bucolic tribute to Banks and Solander—had become a cruel historic joke, like the toxic “Meadowlands” in the “Garden State” of New Jersey, now sown with industrial plants.
As John cleaned up his lunch, he said that Botany Bay represented a “type locality” for dozens of native species, meaning this was the place where they’d first been “discovered” and described. The woods once abounded with wattle, scribbly gums, lillypilly trees, and a palm called burrawang. Koalas were once so common in Kurnell that they were hunted for sport. Now, John said, the koala, as well as the bandicoot, the ring-tailed possum, and many other species were what naturalists term “locally extinct.”
So, too, in a way, was memory of Cook. Later in the week, I returned to Kurnell to sit in on Leanne Noon’s classroom discussion of the field trip. She began by reading to her students from a book called Too Many Captain Cooks. Its cover showed a cartoonish image of Australia, with the modern-day Aboriginal flag at the center and warriors brandishing spears at European ships that invaded from all directions. Skulls decorated the ships’ sterns and tricorn-clad captains stood on the vessels’ decks waving pistols and rapiers.
While Leanne’s students sketched maps of Cook’s route, she showed me the new, state-mandated curriculum for the course she was teaching. Cook appeared in a section about the British “invasion” and “occupation” of Australia. The man himself merited two brief mentions in the eight-page document: students were to learn about “the voyages of James Cook in relation to colonisation” and also about his role in dispossessing Aborigines by claiming the continent for Britain. This was all students learned of Cook. When they resumed Australian history in secondary school, the course started off with the country’s federation in 1901.
“Because we’re just a few hundred yards from his landing site, we do a lot more on Cook than most schools,” Leanne said. After class, she took me to the school assembly in a nearby auditorium. The students arranged themselves in color-coded groups named Cook, Solander, Banks, and Phillip (Arthur Phillip was the captain of the First Fleet). Then they sang the school song, the lyrics of which obviously predated the new curriculum: “Kurnell, birthplace of our nation, our home and our symbol, of our land Australia, our land of hope and freedom!”
The principal appeared onstage, toting a stuffed doll wearing a blue jacket and buckle shoes. Leanne nudged me and said, “That’s Captain Cookie.” The doll, placed on a little red throne called “Cookie’s Chair,” was awarded each week to the class that behaved best, and he occupied that classroom until the following week’s assembly. The tradition had begun decades ago when a sewing teacher at the school decided to craft the doll.
“Parents take Captain Cookie home and mend him,” Leanne whispered. “He’s killed with kindness.”
In the afternoon, I returned to the landing site park. The booth at the entrance was unmanned. There were no school groups visiting—there were no visitors at all, in fact—and the only person in sight was the park manager, Gary Dunnett. He said the park’s shop, café, and information center had all closed in recent years for lack of patronage. In earlier decades, British dignitaries often visited, leaving the silver spades and trowels they used to plant trees by the park’s monuments. Now, even that steady trickle had dried up.
“I’m not sure how you curate a shovel,” Gary said, pointing to a storeroom cluttered with the ceremonial spades, as well as with dusty photographs, a replica of Cook’s sword, and other relics the museum had once displayed. These items now lay forgotten and uncatalogued for lack of money and interest. “No one seems to give a stuff about any of this,” Gary said.
In an attempt to attract more visitors, officials were gradually recasting the park to reflect modern sensibilities. Gary handed me a dense “Draft Plan for Management.” Originally called the Captain Cook Landing Place Reserve, the 250-acre site would now become the “Kamay–Botany Bay National Park” “Kamay” was believed to have been the Aboriginal name for the bay, though no one knew for sure. “Open air multicultural events” and Aboriginal “story telling and celebrations will be encouraged,” the document said. New signs and educational programs would also be designed to “reflect the meeting of cultures rather than the domination of one culture by another.”
“We’re not denying either side,” Gary said. “You can choose which side of the meeting to emphasize, but respect the other. If there’s any space in which we should ask questions about cultural exchange, it should be here.”
As Gary closed up the museum for the day, I wandered outside and read the rest of the document beneath a monument to Solander. Apart from the draft plan’s soulless language, the new agenda seemed well-meaning. But I couldn’t help feeling the same unease I’d experienced when scanning the school curriculum, and while visiting Cook’s landing site in New Zealand, where the plaques spoke of how the English and Maori “learned about each other.”
Reinterpreting history was one thing, rewriting it quite another. At Botany Bay, the English and Aborigines didn’t even speak, at least not in words the other party could understand. As for “cultural exchange,” as Gary Dunnett put it, this had consisted of musket fire and spears. The two societies didn’t “meet” on the beach of Botany Bay. They collided.
But conflict was unfashionable. Better to skirt the whole issue of “the domination of one culture by another.” Better, still, to omit Cook altogether. In late April, on the anniversary of the Endeavour’s landing, I returned to Kurnell for the annual commemoration hosted by local and park officials. In years past, it had been a rather traditional affair, featuring speeches about Cook, gun salutes, and reenactments. Now it was somberly dubbed “The Meeting of Two Cultures Ceremony,” and included an “expression of our cultural differences in verse and song,” as well as a moment of silence to remember “those who lost their lives when our two cultures first met”—even though no one died during Cook’s stay at Botany Bay, except for a consumptive sailor named Forby Sutherland.
The ceremony ended with the singing of “Advance Au
stralia Fair.” Cook had been written out of this, too. The nineteenth-century song had recently become the national anthem, replacing “God Save the Queen”—though not before officials deleted an offending verse, which began: “When gallant Cook from Albion sail’d, / To trace wide oceans o’er, / True British courage bore him on, / Till he landed on our shore.” This cleansing occurred, appropriately, in 1984.
I drove back to Sydney in a state of bewilderment. Small wonder that so few Australians gave a stuff about Cook, or bothered to visit his landing site. Bureaucrats had turned the great adventurer into one of their own: a dull, bloodless figure who attended lots of meetings. Worse than bloodless: invisible. Cook had been curated out of sight, like all those royal shovels.
“Mate, you’ve been away too long,” Roger said, inviting himself over for a drink or three after work, as he often did. He listened politely to my report on Kurnell, then pulled a dictionary from the shelf and read aloud, with some revision: “Captain Cook. On the ritual Day of Atonement, that goat chosen by lot to be sent alive into the wilderness, the sins of the people having been symbolically laid upon it.” He closed the dictionary and topped up his drink. “As you know, I’m not much for atonement. Also, I’m a Pom—at least when it’s convenient to be one. We have enough ‘fuzzy-wuzzies’ to feel guilty about. I’ll leave it to the colonials to say sorry to theirs.”
Roger was right, at least about my having been away too long. When I’d worked as a newspaper reporter in Sydney in the mid-1980s, racial issues rarely blipped across the radar screen of white Australian consciousness. Aborigines, only 2 percent of the nation’s population, were all but invisible in the coastal cities where 85 percent of Australians lived. Few urban Australians ventured into the country’s forbidding interior. Why bother when you could fly for less to Bali?
I’d made a point of visiting the outback whenever I could, on reporting assignments that few other journalists wanted. What I found out there felt like a foreign land, populated, if populated at all—Australia trails only Mongolia and Namibia as the most thinly settled country on earth—by beer-swilling roughnecks, farmers who tended vast sheep and cattle “stations” with helicopters, and Aborigines whose camps reminded me of the most wretched Indian reservations I’d visited in America. Like modern-day Sioux, Aborigines seemed caught between two worlds, unable to reclaim their traditional life but ill equipped, or disinclined, to enter mainstream society. The result, as often as not, was dependence on drink, drugs, and welfare, all of which deepened the racism of rural whites.
But each time I flew home from the outback to Sydney, Aborigines and their problems fell away as abruptly as the dust- and fly-choked landscape I’d left behind. I found myself back in the voluptuous Lotus Land that D. H. Lawrence captured so well when he wrote about “the indifference—the fern-dark indifference of this remote, golden Australia. Not to care—from the bottom of one’s soul, not to care.”
Returning to live in Sydney fifteen years later, I found that everyone now seemed to care. Dinner tables, talk radio, and parliament all brimmed with debate over whether the prime minister should apologize to Aborigines for past wrongs. Soon after my visit to Kurnell, 200,000 people marched across Sydney’s Harbour Bridge as skywriters trailed “SORRY” in the glittering cobalt air overhead. Similar marches followed in every other Australian city, the largest demonstrations in the nation’s history.
For a history-obsessed interloper, what was most striking about this ferment was the way it focused on the past as much as on the present. White Australians, many of them for the first time, were confronting the dark side of their nation’s history. After visiting Kurnell, I decided to do the same.
Once I plunged into the archives, it didn’t take me long to encounter bloody stories of early contact between Aborigines and Europeans. Just two years after Cook’s departure from Botany Bay, a French ship arrived in Tasmania under the command of a Rousseau-loving captain named Marion du Fresne. He ordered his sailors to strip before wading ashore so they could climb from the sea as “natural men” to greet their brothers, the naked Aborigines. Marion du Fresne even hoped that the two parties might compare notes on life in the state of nature.
Instead, this nudist confab collapsed in confusion and conflict. The French quickly opened fire, killing and wounding several Aborigines. The quixotic Marion du Fresne sailed on to meet the noble Maori of New Zealand, who killed and ate him, prompting a retaliatory massacre by the French. “They treated us,” a French lieutenant wrote of the Maori, “with every show of friendship for thirty-three days, with the intention of eating us on the thirty-fourth.” Sic transit noble savage.
Tasmania’s first English settlers picked up where the French had left off. They not only slaughtered natives, but also salted down their remains and sent them to Sydney as anthropological curiosities. Later, when Aborigines speared colonists and their stock, Tasmania’s lieutenant governor ordered 2,200 settlers and convicts to form a human dragnet and march across the island with muskets, dogs, bayonets, and bugles, flushing Aborigines from the bush like so many grouse.
This so-called Black Line failed—Aborigines simply slipped through it—but disease, displacement, and ad hoc shootings eventually succeeded. An estimated four thousand Aborigines lived in Tasmania when Cook visited the island on his third Pacific voyage, in 1777. Seventy years later, Tasmanian Aborigines numbered fewer than fifty. When a woman named Truganini died in 1876, she was declared the island’s last full-blooded native. Her skeleton was exhumed and put in the Tasmanian Museum as a relic of an extinct race; it remained on display until 1947.
I made my own visit to Tasmania and searched for a monument to Truganini, which read: “They roam no more upon this isle so stay and meditate awhile.” I never found it: the memorial, I later learned, had been repeatedly vandalized, and the inscription no longer existed.
Tasmania represented the starkest instance of ethnic cleansing in Australia, but the island’s history differed in degree rather than in kind from what happened elsewhere in the country. Estimates of the Aboriginal population of Australia in 1770 range from 300,000 to a million. In 1901, when Australian states federated to form today’s nation, Aborigines numbered 94,000. That year’s census marked the last official count for decades. Australia’s new constitution didn’t regard Aborigines as citizens; they were denied the vote and other rights, and excluded from the census. Australia also celebrated its nationhood by instituting the “white Australia policy,” to keep out Asian and dark-skinned immigrants.
Massacres of Aborigines continued on the frontier until 1928. In the following four decades, state and church officials routinely took light-skinned Aboriginal children from their families and placed them in orphanages, or with childless white families, in an attempt to assimilate Aborigines and “breed out” black blood. Aboriginal mothers were so fearful of losing pale offspring that they smeared ash or boot-blacking on their children to make them appear darker. In 1966 the government finally scrapped the white-Australia policy, and the next year a referendum granted Aborigines full citizenship.
In many respects, this history mirrored the United States’ hideous treatment of its own natives, as well as its oppression of imported slaves and their descendants. But there were crucial differences. The United States, like Canada and New Zealand, often paid for native land, as well as signing—and quickly breaking—countless treaties. These flawed pacts at least acknowledged native society and sovereignty, creating a basis for modern claims to land and rights.
In Australia, there was no such legacy; the colony was the only British possession where no government pacts were ever signed with natives. Instead, settlers pronounced their continent terra nullius, “land belonging to no one,” thereby justifying the seizure of Aboriginal land without even the fig leaf of a treaty.
But the most profound difference between the United States and Australia was the way in which the two countries regarded natives themselves. Americans often romanticized Indians, even as the n
atives were being slaughtered and dispossessed. By the mid-nineteenth century, there were calls to preserve both the American wilderness and its inhabitants before plows and guns extinguished them. Writers and artists sentimentalized Apaches and Mohicans; baseball teams adopted names such as “Braves” the government emblazoned Indian heads on pennies and created the national holiday of Thanksgiving to commemorate a friendly encounter between Indians and settlers.
Nineteenth-century Australians, by contrast, typecast Aborigines as Stone Age savages, a people of little interest except as human fossils: a Darwinian link between modern man and his primitive ancestors. Physical anthropologists likened Aboriginal skulls to those of chimps and gorillas. The race, they believed, was doomed to disappear due to natural selection.
While Americans tried to justify and glorify their Indian-killers, George Armstrong Custer in particular, Australians simply wrote blacks, and the slaughter of them, out of the nation’s history. Until about 1970, history books and school texts hardly mentioned Aborigines at all. “The great Australian silence,” the anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner termed this amnesia in 1968. “A cult of forgetfulness practiced on a national scale.”
Three decades later, prompted in part by a new generation of Aboriginal activists, white Australia was waking to its unremembered past. The pendulum had swung from one extreme to the other. Aborigines, reviled for more than two centuries, were celebrated at every turn. In the few months after my visit to Kurnell, Aboriginal dancers performed at the Opera House, Aboriginal writers garnered major literary awards, the sprinter Cathy Freeman lit the Olympic torch, and the works of destitute desert artists sold at Sotheby’s for half a million dollars.
This belated embrace was exhilarating to watch, even though many white Australians resisted practical steps to recompense Aborigines, or to help them repair their shattered lives. By every statistical measure, Australia’s indigenous population, at the turn of the millennium, remained the most disadvantaged in the First World. The life span of native Americans trailed others in the United States by three to four years; Maori lagged Pakeha by five. Aborigines’ life expectancy was twenty years less than that of other Australians, putting them on a par with inhabitants of the Sudan. Aboriginal unemployment ran four times the national average, the Poverty rate three times as high. And the government was trying to reverse court orders for the return of mining and grazing lands, or stalling in the orders’ execution.
