Above: Captain Cook taking possession of the Australian continent on behalf of the British Crown, engraving by Samuel Calvert after a painting by Gilfillan, Illustrated Sydney News,1865. (National Library of Australia)
In Australia, the 250th anniversary in 2020 of the landing of Captain James Cook at Botany Bay coincided with a renewed surge around the world to de-memorialise historical monuments. In a year of unprecedented challenges to national narratives, these events further highlighted the extraordinary inequalities experienced in Australia by the descendants of its original inhabitants. Given the inadequacy of any conscious memorialisation, the original landing site at Kurnell on Botany Bay, offers a far more embraceable, comprehensible and enduring memorial.
In Australia, the year’s major disruptor, COVID19, pre-empted any cancel-culture attempt to close down the Cook 250th anniversary commemorations. Their demise allowed most Australians to avoid overthinking their uncertainties concerning Cook; his impacts and his traditional place in the pantheon of modern Australia’s foundational figures.
Botany Bay is well-known as the site of Cook’s epochal first encounter with the ancient continent. Yet that stop-over was essentially for scientific purposes and to access freshwater. A far more significant event, with ramifications down the centuries, occurred four months later and 2750 kilometres (1700 miles) further north. It was 250 years ago on August 22nd, in Torres Strait, off the continent’s northern tip, that Cook formally claimed possession of the east coast for the British Crown. He named as New South Wales, this portion of the continent Europeans knew then as New Holland. Cook made his claim having failed to observe activities that suggested the existence of property ownership and rights, in the European sense.
Many Australians will be surprised to learn that Cook never determined that the land was Terra Nullius or Nobody’s Land. The term simply did not exist in the eighteenth century. It’s a 20th-century conceptualisation that some historians have used to retro-fit the event. In recent times, the term has since come into broad usage. Andrew Fitzmaurice, professor of history at Sydney University, states that “before the 20th century no person would have recognised the term.” “[it] was first used in 1909 in the debate over the status of the polar regions”. Later in the 1950s, it was used “to address one of the most worrying questions of the space race... " Could states claim sovereignty over the moon?
In recent times, the term has been used and applied inconsistently by various protagonists of the History Wars—academic spats within the broader Culture Wars. However, Fitzmaurice is careful to note that, “any account of the justification of dispossession is not going to look dramatically different.” He explains further, that "from the 16th to the 20th century, the dominant legal discourse employed [by Europeans] to justify colonisation was ‘natural law’”... It assumes, “the principle that anything that belongs to no one becomes the property of the first taker.” For Europeans, the concept justified “the argument that indigenous peoples had not exploited nature sufficiently for them to have created extended property rights, let alone sovereignty...” And, “when the international lawyers coined the term Terra Nullius [in the 20th century] they did so as a way of summarising the natural law understanding of property.”
Still, the claim Cook made on Possession Island (known by its original inhabitants as Bedanug or Bedhan Lag), must rank as one of the most far-reaching events in the ancient continent’s extended history. It is unquestionably the most significant determinant of events that followed. At the raising of a flag, a people who had lived on the continent for aeons were—with neither knowledge nor comprehension—completely dispossessed of property they never understood they “owned”.
Above: Possession Island (Abstraction), 1991by Gordon Bennett, MCA, Sydney
Cook’s eighteenth-century claim is based on ownership of property and not on who occupied the land. Over the last sixty years, scientists have opened up an extraordinary record of occupation; one capable of contributing to a far broader national story. At the time of Australian Federation (1901), anthropologists assumed the continent to be the last one occupied by modern humans. Most held then, that occupancy stretched back just several thousand years. In the early 1960s, excavations in Central Queensland dated human occupancy to 19,000 years, upending many long-held assumptions.
In 1980 discoveries at Lake Mungo in western New South Wales pushed back the certainty of human occupancy to 40,000 years. Discoveries from more recent excavations in Arnhem Land (Northern Territory), and published in 2017, reveal evidence of human activity on the continent as far back as 65,000 years—and possibly further. These latest findings suggest that modern humans reached the continent as part of one the very first successful emigrations of Homo Sapiens out of Africa. Knowledge of human occupancy of the Australian continent now exceeds that of Europe and Asia by 20,000 years and North America by nearly 40,000 years.
In awe of the most recent discoveries, one of the Arnhem Land researchers, Professor Bert Roberts of Wollongong University (NSW), wrote in The Conversation, “... Indigenous history has been pushed back into the dizzying expanse of deep time ... [it] transcends our ordinary understanding of time as lived experience. Human experiences are reduced to numbers. And aside from being ‘a long time ago’, they are hard to grasp imaginatively.”
With prescient insight into today's debates, deliberations and disturbances, Professor Roberts added that various people will apply their own understandings to these discoveries. “To political leaders, old dates bestow a veneer of antiquity to a young settler nation. To scientists, they propel Australian history into a global human story and allows us to see ourselves as a species. To Indigenous Australians, they may be valued as an important point of cultural pride or perceived as utterly irrelevant. Their responses are diverse.” When it comes to national narratives, it seems that identity propels meaning.
The 250th anniversary of Cook’s voyage coincides with an extraordinary year of disturbances and disruptions around the globe. Peeled back, they are often attempts to right wrongs that have roots in the colonial era. In the US, disturbances borne of historical and ongoing racial antagonisms have propelled worldwide shifts in consciousness. This must be affecting how all Australians are comprehending seemingly-analogous situations at home.
The sparking events in the US, highlight again that Black Americans continue to endure their unfair share of unjust outcomes. These seem to stem from the country's structural makeup. They are expressed in many of the country’s traditionally-held foundational narratives and represented through its monuments and memorials. When pent-up anger again exploded, aggrieved groups and their supporters directed their rage toward these symbolically rich, but ultimately inanimate objects.
The inequity so apparent in American society is easily seen from afar. So it must be shocking for many Australians to realise that’s the descendants of their land's original inhabitants suffer far worse outcomes on many of the visible indicators of inequality. Regarding imprisonment and longevity, compared to Black Americans, the measures for Australian male descendants of its original inhabitants are between two and three times worse.
With analogous histories, the outcome measures when compared to Native Americans are probably more salient. When compared to the general population, male descendants of Australia’s original inhabitants, experience imprisonment and longevity outcomes at roughly double the rate of Native Americans.
In a febrile social climate, the numerous memorials and monuments strung out along the Kurnell shore, appear somewhat self-conscious. They’ve been accumulating there since 1822 when the Sydney Philosophical Society first placed a plaque on a headland, a kilometre from Cook's exact landing spot. Many more have since appeared. The most “classical” monument along the landing site shore, is the sandstone obelisk erected in 1870, at the time of the 100th anniversary. Together these monuments and memorials overwhelmingly honour the significance of Cook, marking different aspects of the landing. The sign-posted recognition of midden sites (refuse repositories indicating occupation by the originals inhabitants), seems modest by comparison.
There is a series of images near the landing site that give an impression of the original inhabitants fishing in canoes. In fact, they are scenes from Port Jackson (Sydney), drawn after the establishment of Sydney in 1788. Not to worry. In 1970 the nationally televised Bicentenary landing pageant in front of the Queen presented the act of possession as occurring at Botany Bay. As described, it happened thousands of kilometres away in Torres Strait. Meanwhile, the National Gallery of Victoria’s expansive Edwardian canvas by E. Phillips Fox “Landing of Captain Cook at Botany Bay, 1770 (not on display)” has Cook’s benign hand restraining those sailors who would fire the first shots at the original inhabitants. It was Cook himself who fired.
When it comes to Cook and Kurnell, it’s pretty easy to see how memorials are better at reflecting the needs of their times than the actuality of the events. They are inert, self-dating snapshots, erected to support the needs and claims of particular grandees of the time. The monuments at Kurnell remained unmolested during this year of historic inflections. However, a nocturnal protester did daub paint on the founding-father effigy of Cook that stands proud in Hyde Park in the city of Sydney, beholding the wrong harbour.
Writing in 2017, after an earlier graffiti attack on the same Cook monument, noted journalist Stan Grant said, “... statues, plaques, inscriptions—these are symbols. They are important because they tell us who we have been; they illustrate our story. But a nation is us; it is people.”
Memorials have a limited capacity to reconcile meanings or to navigate the fevered atmosphere of contested histories successfully. So, maybe the Kurnell Peninsula in its entirety offers its more natural and enduring memorial.
The site gives the natural context and most evident perspective from which to consider the nature and consequences of the first mutually incomprehensible contact between Cook and the original inhabitants. On the ocean side, virgin scrubby bushland, rocky cliffs and the eternal rolling seas, evokes a sense of a timeless, ancient continent before Cook’s arrival. At the actual landing site inside the Bay, sweeping views toward a distant gleaming city, suggest the passage of time. It gives pause to consider the events and process that separate the present from its originating site.
It's a rich viewpoint, from which to contemplate Stan Grant’s observation. “Carl Jung pondered the nature of the spirit of land; what he saw as a sacred thing. Land assimilates the conqueror ... Two peoples here; two stories, two rivers, that meet.” Comprehending this idea may be the most productive point from which to continue toward reconciliation—a process that the present inequalities suggest has barely started.
Further Reading
The Incomprehensible First Contact
Deafness to Doubt
