CAPTAIN JAMES COOK
An animal something less than a greyhound, it was of a mouse colour very slender made and swift of foot . . . the full size of a greyhound . . . with a long tail . . . I should have taken it for a wild dog, but for its walking or running in which it jumped like a hare or a deer . . . its progression is by hopping or jumping 7 or 8 feet at each hop upon its hind legs only, for in this it makes no use of the fore, which seem to be only designed for scratching in the ground. Excepting the head and ears which I thought was something like a hare’s, it bears no sort of resemblance to any European animal I ever saw.
But gunguuru was the name given by the locals to a specific species of kangaroo. Aboriginal people had different names for different species of kangaroo, and other names for male and female animals.
SAM NEILL
The name this fantastic beast has carried with it since the time of Cook comes to us from the local Aboriginal language. And that our national symbol – on the Australian coat of arms – has its basis in Indigenous language says something about the potential for much greater integration of our shared histories and languages than we have done otherwise.
Still, the name stuck. One of the kangaroos was shot and eaten by the officers and gentlemen, and declared ‘fine fare’. Meanwhile,
A Singular Animal Called Kanguroo Found on the Coast of New Holland, engraving after George Stubbs, c.1773. Considering all he had to go on was Cook’s fanciful description, Parkinson’s sketches and one dried skin, Stubbs made a reasonable fist of illustrating the kangaroo for an eager audience.
National Library of Australia, 7412 #S1700
Banks had grand plans for its skin. When Banks returned to England he commissioned George Stubbs, one of the foremost Georgian painters, to produce a portrait of the peculiar animal from the skin. The artist inflated it in an attempt to understand the animal’s anatomy; this explains its rather unconvincing posture in Stubbs’ painting. Along with the partner painting, Portrait of a Large Dog, which shows a dingo that looks suspiciously like a fox, these are the first known depictions of these two animals in Western art.
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For Cook, the eight days in Botany Bay yielded only frustration. He had failed in his attempts to connect with the locals and initiate trade for the supplies they so desperately needed. But not everyone on board was so forlorn. The Endeavour’s scientists were having an absolute field day. For Joseph Banks and his fellow scientists, this place was a veritable Garden of Eden.
PROFESSOR DARREN CRAYN,
Australian Tropical Herbarium
When they arrived on these shores no European had ever been on the east coast of Australia and certainly no men of science. They’d never seen anything like most of these plants. Prior to this voyage it was usually just the ship’s surgeon that did the natural history. When they weren’t hacking off gangrenous limbs and treating scurvy, they were collecting molluscs and plants. But they were usually only trained in a very rudimentary way in the natural sciences. But Banks was able to bring a team of eight on the voyage – himself, Daniel Solander and another naturalist and two illustrators, two servants and two assistants. Together they comprised almost 10 per cent of the entire crew. That was unheard of at that stage.
It’s important to remember that the voyage of the Endeavour was more than just a naval venture; it was a true Enlightenment pleasure cruise. This was the first time Britain sent out a voyage of exploration carrying a full entourage of naturalists and artists to classify and record the things they saw. One of the illustrators, Sydney Parkinson, painted ninety-four watercolours and sketches in Botany Bay, while Banks and Solander collected and classified innumerable botanical samples.
Banks’ efforts were prodigious. Over the course of the first voyage, he collected specimens of 110 genera and 1400 species that were unknown to science. The tally of the world’s known plant species increased by 10 per cent after the Endeavour returned to Britain. Once he returned to London, Banks set to work trying to lose the paradise he had found on the other side of the world. He became the principal lobbyist for establishing a British penal colony in Australia, and it’s widely accepted that without his efforts the First Fleet would not have set sail.
Unfortunately for the poor souls who first landed in New South Wales, the man who was largely responsible for sending them there was a scientist, not a chef. While he was gathering botanical samples in and around Botany Bay, and tagging and classifying them as scientific curios, he had no idea that to the locals, many of these plants were culinary staples.
JODY ORCHER, Ularai/Barkandji Nation, Educator
I ask people, what’s your favourite fruit and vegetable? And they’ll give me a list. Then I’ll ask what their favourite Australian fruit and vegetable is and they don’t know. But there’s probably a plant that’s been in their yard all their life and they don’t know they can eat it and cook it.
Each time Cook dropped anchor he was looking for three things: water, food and grass – the latter to feed the mobile menagerie on board. His experience around the Pacific had been that the locals were generally open to trade for all the things he needed, but in Australia they were left to their own devices. So Cook and his men hunted and fished for whatever they could get. And, intending to improve conditions for future European visitors to these shores, in far north Queensland Cook set loose a brace of pigs to breed. Needless to say, they did what Cook – and nature – intended and bred like . . . pigs. To excess. The creatures descended from those imports continue to cause environmental chaos in the rainforest.
Banks was scathing about Australia’s culinary offerings, declaring it ‘a country where we had not the least reason to hope for subsistence . . . so barren had we always found it’. How did he think the Aboriginal people kept themselves going if it was so difficult to find food?
JODY ORCHER
A traditional lifestyle wasn’t like having breakfast, lunch and dinner. It was more of having a little bit of what you might still have left over from the night before and then foraging. So you’d be looking for those little fruits – lilli pillies – or looking for those sweet grevillea nectars, things to give you energy bursts until you had your next meal.
When the First Fleet anchored in Botany Bay, Joseph Banks made sure they brought with them all the agricultural comforts of home. Rather than making the most of what they found growing naturally, the first settlers tried – and failed dismally – to cultivate European grains, fruits and vegetables, and were driven to the point of starvation. The men and women of the First Fleet stripped the land of anything deemed edible or useful, destroying in months an ecosystem that had allowed the Dharawal people to subsist for generations.
Unfortunately for Botany Bay’s resident bird life, one of the favourite dishes on board the Endeavour was lorikeet pie. Why just admire nature when you can eat it, too?
SYDNEY PARKINSON (1745–1771), Scottish Botanical and Natural History Illustrator on Cook’s first voyage
[S]aw a great number of birds of a beautiful plumage; among which were two sorts of parakeets, and a beautiful lorikeet . . . we shot a few of them, which we made into a pie, and they ate very well.
Rainbow lorikeets are rather sleek birds, so it’s difficult to imagine them yielding much edible meat. They’re certainly no plump-breasted pigeon. One little fledgling amongst them got lucky that day. It was rescued from the pot by Tupaia, who adopted it as his pet. And that wasn’t the end of this extraordinary creature’s story.
Having polished off their lorikeet pie, the men turned their hungry eyes to the waters. The original name for Botany Bay, Kamay, is the Dharawal word for the stingray’s barb. No surprises, then, to find an abundance of stingrays in the clear waters. For their final fresh feed in the bay, the men were served stingray with a side order of the one local green they deemed edible: warrigal greens, which Banks likened to spinach. The greens were particularly important to the Endeavour’s crew as a means of staving off the dreaded scurvy. With no idea h
ow long it might be between Botany Bay and a plate of greens, the seamen must have tucked into the vegetables with gusto.
Scurvy is a horror. The potentially fatal disease, caused by severe vitamin C and B deficiency, was for many centuries the scourge of long-range European maritime voyages. A vivid description of the symptoms was written in the mid-1770s, listing blackened skin, shedding of teeth, ulcers, difficulty breathing and, most hideously, a sudden eruption of gum tissue in the mouth that rotted away. Although many mariners knew that fresh fruit and vegetables – particularly citrus fruit and greens – would keep scurvy at bay, they were too perishable to be useful on long voyages. As maritime powers extended their reach around the globe, finding a way to treat the disease became a high priority.
Cook had been instructed by the Admiralty to test the efficacy of fermented malt and wort and sauerkraut as a means of warding off scurvy. He attributed his apparent success at keeping the disease at bay to regular doses of fermented malt, but it’s more likely that it was due to his attention to hygiene and keeping the ship clean and his men warm and well rested. That, and the fact that he made the most of any opportunity to ply his men with fresh greens. In Botany Bay, the warrigal greens made this easy. But as the journey progressed, it would become more challenging.
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Seeds from the warrigal greens would eventually find their way back to London via Joseph Banks’ agency, where a taste for the Australian vegetable became quite the thing in fashionable London circles. By then, Banks had other things on his mind, foremost amongst which was protecting and promoting Cook’s legacy. Banks would become Cook’s most passionate champion. In a way this is peculiar, because throughout the voyage of the Endeavour their relationship, although largely cordial, was not without its issues. Cook and the other naval officers were not accustomed to sharing their space with so many civilians who were unfamiliar with the ways of the navy. Given his social standing, Banks could be high-handed, and for Cook it must have been challenging to share the Great Cabin with him and the naturalist Daniel Solander.
Without the agency of Joseph Banks, it’s quite possible that James Cook would have remained a footnote in Australia’s history. But that wasn’t to be. In white Australia, Cook would eventually assume mythical status. And without any consultation, the Indigenous Australians who had called the continent home for tens of thousands of years, found themselves lumbered with a brand-new, British founding father.
EIGHT
LARGER THAN LIFE
I really underestimated how strongly people felt about Cook. I guess I knew he was unpopular in some parts. But I hadn’t realised there was such anger. On the one hand, I vaguely understand that anger. But on the other, I’m not sure how fair it is to blame Cook.
SAM NEILL
Australia can’t get enough of its ‘big’ things. The big pineapple. The big koala. The big lobster. The big banana. There are even big potatoes complete with big forks. So it should be expected that Australia would also put in an order for a big foundation myth.
What any fledgling nation needs more than almost anything else is an uplifting genesis story – all the best countries have them. When Australia decided to let go of mummy’s hand in 1901 and step forward into the world with head held high as an independent nation, it needed its own mythology.
Sure, the beliefs of the Aboriginal people had sustained them for tens of thousands of years. Not to mention, their origin story was pretty spectacular. But that wasn’t much help to white Australia.
WARWICK THORNTON, Kaytej Nation, Filmmaker/Director
There was something bigger here in Australia. There was an existence that was sustainable and a culture with laws and a religion that covered much bigger concepts of life, humanity and connectedness. Pre-Cook, this place was bigger than Europe . . . bigger than Asia in a way. What has happened is that we’ve lost a lot of that through this bloke rocking up.
The leaders of this great land fished around in their nation’s embarrassingly short history to find a worthy founding father. And in Captain James Cook, the unmoored British colony found its made-to-measure saviour – the brave, steadfast British explorer who risked life and limb to cross the oceans and discover this wide brown land and claim it for the Crown. He even came pre-packaged with a suitably tragic end. Perfect!
Captain Cook discovered Australia in 1770. Got it? Good. Because that’s exactly what all children who went through the Australian school system prior to the 1980s were taught.
DR SHAYNE WILLIAMS, Dharawal Nation, Senior Cultural Knowledge Holder
We went to school and all they ever taught us was how Cook discovered Australia. Well, this country was occupied by us well before 1770. If anyone discovered this country, it’s us. But we were never told that side of the story in history classes in school.
History lesson done and dusted. Cook ‘discovered’ Australia just as Columbus ‘discovered’ America.
It must have occurred to more than a handful of students to ask how it was possible to ‘discover’ a land already inhabited by human beings, but such insolent questions most likely earnt the inquisitive soul a swift backhander or trip to the principal’s office.
WARWICK THORNTON
The Captain Cook I grew up with is from the textbooks, so in a strange way I grew up thinking that he found Australia. The only thing I had a conflict with was the idea that there was nobody here. But you can’t put your hand up in class and go, ‘No, we were here first, sir.’ But when you see other people putting a person up on a pedestal as the perfect explorer . . . the perfect human, the great saviour . . . you really do start to hate him. I think that’s what created the antagonism towards him. But he was a patsy. He was doing the dirty work of something much bigger, and much darker.
There’s a spot deep in the heart of Melbourne’s Fitzroy Gardens that embodies the fabrication of Captain James Cook’s myth. In 1933, a wealthy philanthropist, Sir Russell Grimwade, acquired a quaint Georgian cottage in the village of Great Ayton, Yorkshire, and transported it, brick by brick and at enormous expense, to Melbourne. This was not just any cottage; this was, according to local legend, Captain Cook’s home. There is a catch, though, as there so often is. Yes, this had been ‘Cook’s’ cottage – Cook senior, that is. As in, James Cook’s father. Although James may have visited his parents there once or twice, no amount of creative licence could justify saying he lived in the house.
That this furphy took root in a corner of Australia that Cook never even visited is symptomatic of the Cookmania that took hold in the country after Federation. What was happening to Cook was an early, and very effective, example of what’s known today as ‘spin’. In the utopian era before PR agents and marketing executives became ubiquitous, Cook was trimmed, plucked, bleached and blow-waved into shape to give the nascent nation the daddy figure it was looking for.
The Cook we know from primary historical sources was a fiercely ambitious man. He certainly wanted to make a mark. But he was also remarkably modest and not one to blow his own trumpet. Witness, for example, the fact that unlike most other navigators, he didn’t name anything much after himself. The places around the world that now bear his name – Cooktown, Cook Strait, Mount Cook and Cook’s Bay amongst many others – were named by others. It’s not unreasonable to think that he would have been fairly embarrassed by all the fuss.
As an unassuming man, Cook would have had good reason to blush. Every spot along Australia’s eastern coast that can claim to even the slightest association with him is graced by at least one memorial to commemorate the fact. There’s even a town in Queensland called 1770.
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Even decades before Federation, the legend of Cook had already been growing exponentially as Australia began to morph from a colonial offshoot of Great Britain into an independent nation.
WARWICK THORNTON
The British Empire was basically built on stealing everyone else’s resources. But they basically obliterated some of the kindest, most beautiful cultures in th
e world to create this nation we call Australia today.
When a statue of Cook was unveiled in 1879 in Hyde Park, Sydney, more than sixty thousand people went along for a stickybeak – a figure that’s all the more remarkable because it amounted to 10 per cent of the population of the entire colony of New South Wales.
This statue is instantly recognisable. Standing atop a mighty granite plinth with one foot tipping over the edge of the base as if he has been interrupted mid-stride, Cook is depicted as a resolute and determined man of action. He holds his telescope in one hand and raises the other in a gesture of . . . is it pride? Is Cook acknowledging the silent applause of his people? There’s a sense of self-importance in his stance and outlook that seems at odds with what we know of him (or what we think we know of him, anyway). This haughty figure bears little resemblance to the portraits made of Cook by artists who knew him. Those likenesses captured a reflective and restrained man who almost seems to recoil from the viewer. Cook’s piercing brown eyes gleam with keen intelligence but in most cases he looks away from the viewer, deep in contemplation and apparently a little discomfited by the attention. Compare these with the portraits of Cook’s partner in crime, Joseph Banks, who leans towards his audience and locks the viewer in his gaze, giving us the sense he’d do anything to be able to burst out of the picture frame.
But verisimilitude was not of much concern to the burghers of Sydney town. The Cook they stuck on a plinth in the middle of the city’s most important public park had a job to do. In his speech at the unveiling of the Hyde Park memorial, the governor, Sir Hercules Robinson (yes, his name was really Hercules), described Cook as a ‘humane, just and God-fearing man’ and urged Australia’s youth to ‘imitate his nobility of character’.
The Pacific Page 13
