In Australia, the appetite for all things Cook was insatiable. Even his failures were commemorated. His thwarted attempt to land at Woonona was honoured by a memorial erected by the local Rotary Club. Surmounted by a stern portrait of Cook in profile flanked by twin copies of George Stubbs’ Kongouru, it’s inscribed: ‘Near this spot Captain James Cook first attempted landing in Australia 28th April 1770.’ It’s a miracle we don’t also have a memorial or two recalling: ‘Near this spot in 1770, Captain James Cook sneezed.’
Of course, the site that looms the largest in Australia’s narrative about James Cook is the place he first set foot on the continent, just twelve hours after weighing anchor and turning his back on Woonona. Botany Bay or Kamay is deeply meaningful for Indigenous and non-indigenous Australians, although the reasons couldn’t be more different.
DR SHAYNE WILLIAMS
This place is very special to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people right across the nation because this is where the country was annexed to the British Empire and where dispossession began.
From the British perspective, Botany Bay was where modern Australia was born. It was also the place where the post-settlement myth-making machine groaned into action. What’s often forgotten is that even though Joseph Banks identified it as being the perfect spot to lay the foundations of the first British settlement in Australia, he was there in May after autumn rains. Which meant there was water. When the commander of the First Fleet, Captain Arthur Phillip, sailed into Botany Bay on 18 January 1788 with his eleven ships, it was mid-summer and fresh water was in short supply. For a fledgling settlement, it was quite an oversight.
Phillip immediately set about finding an alternative location and very quickly happened upon what’s widely regarded as the most stunning harbour in the world. Sydney Harbour was also, thankfully, blessed with an abundance of potable water. Cook had sailed right past Sydney Heads and although he noted its potential at the time, he had no real reason to investigate because he had fully restocked his ship in Botany Bay. Phillip relocated the first settlers to Sydney Cove on 26 January, which is why that date is now celebrated as ‘Australia Day’. The colony’s false start on 18 January was relegated to the dustbin of history.
Botany Bay wouldn’t be forgotten, though. It would retain its standing thanks to Cook. His landing there was a symbolic moment signifying the birth of the colony that would morph into modern Australia. Preserved in the visual memory of most of the children who were taught that Captain Cook ‘discovered’ Australia in 1770 is the iconic painting by Emanuel Phillips Fox, The Landing of Captain Cook at Botany Bay, 1770, painted in 1902, just one year after Federation. This is Cook as described by Governor Hercules Robinson – leading his men from the front with a sense of justice and humanity. Rather than raising a gun to shoot at the Dharawal people on the distant hill, he lifts his hand to reassure his nervous crew and commands them to hold their fire.
To commemorate the landing in Botany Bay, from 1899 until the 1950s this momentous occasion was re-enacted each year in official ceremonies. Dignitaries would hop aboard a steamship and cut through the waves to Kurnell where they would halt over the spot where the Endeavour anchored before landing to hoist the flag and make the requisite toasts and speeches. Why, you may well ask, was this deemed necessary?
The hoisting of the flag was an important eighteenth-century European maritime practice as a means of laying claim to a land. All along the eastern Australian coastline, Cook planted the flag in the earth when he managed to reach the shore and brandished it in the air where he could not. By recording this in his journal, Cook was claiming the eastern coast of Australia in the name of King George III. When he reached the very top of the continent, he considered the job done.
TINA NGATA, Ngāti Porou Tribe
Flag raising and the Doctrine of Discovery . . . It’s one of those things that you think – how did someone in France . . . somebody in Spain . . . somebody in England . . . somebody in Holland . . . all happen to have the same idea that we raise a flag and this is what that means? It was the ceremonial enactment of the Discovery doctrine. It was certainly understood to be something that forfeited the sovereign rights of the people of that land.
The replication of the ritual in Botany Bay each year was a way of reinforcing possession of the land.
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Needless to say, Aboriginal Australians have always seen these events in a completely different light. Cutting to the heart of the matter is a painting by contemporary artist Daniel Boyd. Its title is fairly unambiguous: We Call Them Pirates Out Here. In a scathing parody of the original painting, Boyd’s Cook steps ashore wearing an eye patch and brandishing a skull and crossbones where Phillips Fox’s Cook carries the Red Ensign. The eye patch is also deeply symbolic. Yes, it signifies piracy, but it also stands for the ‘one-eyed’ perspective European settlers brought to Australian shores, declaring as ‘unoccupied’ the territory they seized. Boyd gives us an unambiguous view of the beach from an Aboriginal perspective and shows this moment for what it was – a land grab.
For the Dharawal people, the appearance of the Endeavour in Botany Bay was a significant moment. Oral histories tell us that they thought Cook’s ship was a floating island. At first they believed the men on board were spirits returning from the afterlife.
ROD MASON, Dharawal Nation, Cultural Teacher
It was believed in the camps that when a black man dies he goes over to the other side and comes back white. So when Cook and his men arrived here, we thought they were ghosts. When we die, the arm of a cabbage tree palm takes us across to the other side – the water to the east . . . and we walk across to another world.
It was no surprise, then, that the Dharawal did everything they could to avoid the spectral new arrivals. Visitors from the afterlife? Under what circumstances would that be a good thing? The only reason the spirits could have for being there was to carry the Dharawal into the next life. Leaving behind peculiar objects didn’t help the British case and of course the Dharawal refused to touch the trinkets Cook left in their campsite. Why would they go anywhere near things that came from these ghouls?
As they watched the sailors climb the rigging, the Dharawal began to doubt their first impressions. Perhaps these creatures weren’t spirits after all, but goomeras (possums) scrambling up and down the ship’s masts. Whether they were spirits or possums, the Dharawal people weren’t going to let these strange creatures land without opposition. And here we find another example of the Cook myth-making apparatus at work. Because it has long been claimed that when the Endeavour arrived in Botany Bay it encountered no resistance at all.
Even without drawing upon local oral traditions, there’s no shortage of evidence that reveals the opposition Cook faced from the locals when he attempted to land.
DR SHAYNE WILLIAMS
The warriors were already painted up as they arrived. I doubt it was coincidence. They painted themselves up in anticipation that the vessel was on its way. In particular ceremonies you use particular colours – white is usually used for serious occasions – either punishments or to repel intruders.
Banks speaks of warriors threatening them with ‘crooked’ weapons shaped like the curved blade of a scimitar – his description of boomerangs. He also recalled the warriors wielding spears and woomera – an Aboriginal innovation that improved the spear’s speed and accuracy. Until the invention of the self-loading rifle, the woomera and spear were the fastest weapons in the world.
SIR JOSEPH BANKS (1743–1820), 1st Baronet, Naturalist and Botanist on Cook’s first voyage
[A]ll . . . were armed with long pikes and a wooden weapon made something like a short scimitar. During this time a few of the Indians who had not followed the boat remained on the rocks opposite the ship, threatening and menacing with their pikes and swords . . .. Each of these held in his hand a wooden weapon about 2 feet long, in shape much resembling a scimitar; the blades of these looked whitish and some thought shining insomuch that they were a
lmost of opinion that they were made of some kind of metal, but myself thought they were no more than wood smeared over with the same white pigment with which they paint their bodies.
These people could spear kangaroos and wallabies bounding through the bush. They wouldn’t have missed a cluster of sailors bobbing about in a boat. If they had wanted to hit the interlopers, the sailors would have ended up with more holes than a colander.
DR SHAYNE WILLIAMS
Our people are so skilful with the spear, that if they really wanted to hit them with the spear, they would have. These were warning shots.
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The tweaking of the history of Aboriginal resistance happened just as Cook was assuming his position at the summit of white Australia’s secular pantheon. Prior to Federation, there are illustrations of the resistance put up by the Dharawal that day, described as the ‘Battle of Botany Bay’. But after that? Nothing. This ties in with the myth that when Cook arrived, Aboriginal people had no concept of land ownership but were just wandering around enjoying a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, eating whatever they found lying around the place, with little or no connection to the land. The story was that they didn’t fight to defend their turf because one piece of bush is as good as the next when you’re a hunter-gatherer, right?
Wrong. We now know this to be complete bunkum. Although Aboriginal Australians didn’t mark out boundaries in a way that would have been obvious to a European eye, they did, and still do, have strong connections to traditional lands bounded by geographic markers and preserved in oral records. As in Tahiti, the problem arose because Aboriginal and British conceptions of ‘ownership’ and territoriality are at odds.
DR SHAYNE WILLIAMS
We don’t feel like the land is separate from us. Spiritualism is in everything – in other life forms, in inanimate things like rocks and stones as well as in mountains and hills. It’s about being in unison with country.
Just because something wasn’t written down doesn’t mean it didn’t exist. But the lack of a tangible record or any visual markers – fences, signposts – does make it much easier to take something that you don’t think belongs to anyone else.
Possession Island’s name tells you everything you really need to know. It is a tiny dot of land at the northern tip of Cape York Peninsula. When Cook stepped ashore just before sunset on 22 August 1770, he climbed to the top of the highest hill to get a view of the surrounding islands and confirm he had passed the northernmost point of the eastern coastline. He acknowledged in his journal that the land to the west had already been charted by the Dutch and so belonged to them. As an afterthought, he struck that line out. Why admit anything in writing that could give England’s maritime competitors an advantage? While the Union Jack was hoisted, the marines on the hilltop fired three volleys that were answered by guns on the Endeavour. Cook had charted the entire east coast – as far as he was concerned, that gave him the right to claim these lands, despite their occupation by Indigenous Australians.
CAPTAIN JAMES COOK
[I]n the name of his Majesty . . . I now once more hoisted English colours and in the name of His Majesty King George the Third took possession of the whole eastern coast from the above latitude down to this place by the name of New South Wales together with all the bays, harbours rivers and islands situate upon the same said coast.
Hence, Possession Island.
Of course Cook knew these lands were occupied. Although Possession Island is deserted today, in 1770 the place known to locals as Bedanug was home to the Kaurareg people. Cook had passed a group of them as he climbed the hill.
What’s difficult to understand is the contradiction we find between what actually occurred and the instructions Cook was given by the Admiralty:
You are also with the consent of the natives to take possession of convenient situations in the country in the name of the King of Great Britain: Or: if you find the country uninhabited take possession for His Majesty by setting up proper marks and inscriptions, as first discoverers and possessors.
There was no ambiguity in the ‘hints’ the Earl of Morton had given Cook at the beginning of the voyage as guidelines for playing nicely with the locals. Just a reminder here – he declared all indigenous inhabitants ‘the natural, and in the strictest sense of the word, the legal possessors of the several regions they inhabit’. But that wasn’t all. ‘No European nation has a right to occupy any part of their country, or settle among them without their voluntary consent’.
Yet occupy Aboriginal land they did.
ERNIE DINGO, Yamatji Nation, Actor
There’s a lot to be angry about. But rather than be angry about what’s been done towards blackfellas in this country . . . well, you’d be up all night. These places had traditional names. Now they’re all desecrated by giving them a new name, even to the stage where out of hundreds of major languages, now there’s less than eighty spoken on a daily basis. You wouldn’t do that to Europe. Get the whole of Europe with all of their different languages to speak one language. They’re all going to jump up and down . . . ‘Ooh that’s my heritage!’ Well, this is our heritage. We all had to stop speaking our native tongue to speak whitefella.
The logical conclusion from all this is that Aboriginal people were dispossessed and marginalised by Cook and those who came after him because they didn’t govern themselves by the same rules of social hierarchy that were familiar to Westerners.
In Tahiti and New Zealand, there were chieftains – kings and queens. That was easy for Cook to understand. But everything else about Indigenous Australian society – from their relationship to the land to their social hierarchy – was so strange and unfamiliar to him that he couldn’t fully comprehend the highly ritualised interactions that existed between the people who lived there. Even Tupaia struggled to understand the Aboriginal way of life.
Meanwhile, the (deservedly) much-maligned Doctrine of Discovery underpinned the early European voyages of exploration. Issued as a papal edict in 1452, it held that as Christian nations were favoured by God, they were expected to observe the rule of law when interacting with other sovereign Christian nations. But when it came to lands that were populated by ‘heathens’, the gloves were off. These places were deemed to have been ‘discovered’ by Christian explorers because the people who lived there were classified as subhuman. Why else do you think Indigenous Australians weren’t permitted to vote in Federal elections until 1962, and until 1967 weren’t counted in the national census? They were lumped in with the native flora and fauna.
DR SHAYNE WILLIAMS: When Rod and I were born in 1960, for the first seven years we weren’t classified as humans.
ROD MASON: I’ll never ever get rid of that way of feeling, until someone or something comes together and tries to sort this out.
DR SHAYNE WILLIAMS: 1770 was a real precursor to all of that.
Regardless of the justifications given, hubris and greed would see the entire continent of Australia deemed terra nullius. Nobody’s land.
WARWICK THORNTON
Terra nullius said ‘they’re all nomads – the missing link . . . We’ll do some studies – then we’ll decide they’re actually subhuman, so they don’t really have any idea about owning anything. So we’ll just claim it all and if they object, we’ll just shoot the shit out of them.’
It was the Governor of New South Wales, Sir Richard Bourke, who came up with this idea. When the upstart would-be founding father of Melbourne, John Batman, attempted to purchase land from the Aboriginal people living along the Yarra River, he wanted to establish a settlement. But Bourke stymied his plans by issuing a proclamation on 10 October 1835 that declared as trespassers all people occupying land in Australia without the express consent of the government. The idea underpinning this was that nobody had owned the land before the British Crown claimed it – therefore, apparently the Wurundjeri people had no right to sell any land to Batman.
Times, they are a-changin’, though. When Eddie Koiki Mabo and four other Meriam people e
mbarked on their campaign to reclaim their traditional lands in the Torres Strait, it took many years of determined social, political and legal action before a ruling was passed down in the favour of the plaintiffs. Eddie Mabo himself didn’t live to see the 1992 law passed that became a landmark precedent, sending ‘terra nullius’ back into the dark ages where it belongs. Under what’s now known as the Mabo Case, the Australian High Court determined that common law as it stood violated international human rights and denied the historical dispossession of Australia’s first occupants. The doctrine of native title was enshrined in law, acknowledging that Aboriginal people have a prior claim to the lands taken by the Crown in 1770.
DR SHAYNE WILLIAMS
We might have won some little battles here and there, but in terms of the reconciliation process, we’re way behind other parts of the world. There’s a lot more soul-searching that needs to be done on behalf of the non-Aboriginal people who actually govern this country.
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While myriad Aboriginal nations were dispossessed of land in the wake of Cook’s journey, they certainly didn’t go quietly. It’s a fight that continues today.
ROD MASON
We’ve been displaced from what we once were responsible for, and all we want to do is to belong again. It’s not given to us – we can’t be given back something that always belonged to us. All we want is to be repositioned in this universe again.
The battle is often fought through art. This has become a way for Aboriginal people to reclaim land and territory, and to assert ownership and connection to country.
WARWICK THORNTON
Today, Indigenous people have to prove their connection to country, even though we’ve just had two hundred years of people trying to obliterate our existence as Indigenous people. In the court of law we have to prove after 250 years that we are still part of the country and have cultural practices and spiritual connections with the land, and that we still hunt and live traditionally on country even though they’ve spent the last 250 years stopping us from doing anything. It’s hypocritical, and it’s disgusting.
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