A problem with the way Cook’s voyage has been taught to generations of Australians is that it has been so relentlessly Anglo-Centric. The much earlier and more significant exploration of Dutch navigators has often been overlooked particularly in the eastern mainland states.
With the widespread reporting of this year’s diminished Anzac Day, it seems we have forgotten the cancellation of the planned commemoration of the 250th anniversary of Cook’s voyage along the east coast of Australia between April and August 1770.
It was to be a well- funded affair concentrating on the landing in Botany Bay in early May and the forced seven weeks sojourn in July and August in the Endeavour River. There was to be a voyage by the New Endeavour which would circumnavigate the continent.
The whole venture would have been controversial but may have resulted in a worthwhile and quite necessary debate. Numerous issues stand out. The whole question of ‘discovery’ needs to be reassessed. The idea is offensive to the First Nation’s community for obvious reasons. But that’s only the start of it. It did not stand up in European international law. Hugo Grotius the founding father of the discipline declared that it was shameless ‘to claim for oneself by right of discovery what is held by another, even though the occupant may be wicked, may hold wrong views about God or maybe dull of wit. For discovery applies to those things which belong to no-one.’
Another problem with the way Cook’s voyage has been taught to generations of Australians is that it has been so relentlessly Anglo-Centric. The much earlier and more significant exploration of Dutch navigators has often been overlooked particularly in the eastern mainland states. The first Dutch party landed on Cape York in 1606 a century and a half before Cook came ashore there to make his claim of British sovereignty. Twenty-nine further expeditions mapped the coastline from the tip of Cape York to the south coast of Tasmania. It was for this reason that the projected circumnavigation seemed like an example of ad-man’s overreach. Cook’s voyage meant nothing to Western Australians and not much more to Tasmanians. Cook visited the Island in 1786 but he had been preceded by the Dutch in 1642 and the French ln 1772.
But the insistence that Cook had ‘discovered’ New South Wales allowed generations of Australians to believe that in some way his intrepid seamanship had earned for Britain the right to the eastern half of the continent. It is unsurprising that Cook’s ceremony on Possession Island just off the coast of Cape York in the third week of August during which he ‘took possession’ of Eastern Australia would be the most contested aspect of the epic voyage.
Henry Reynolds is an eminent Australian historian.
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6 responses to “HENRY REYNOLDS. James Cook and the Contested ‘Discovery’ of Eastern Australia”
What exactly was Cook doing in 1770 remains a live issue among serious historians, of which I am not. It seems his scientific objectives were well-publicised but his strategic and political objectives were not. His report on the possibility of white settlement was forgotten about in political circles until the political disasters in North America created a demand for locations to deposit growing numbers of British and Irish convicts. Interest in Botany Bay revived in 1776 but it was up against a competitor in Walvis Bay, now in Namibia.
The Brittanica reports that “a mid-19th-century rush for guano deposits on a number of adjacent islands was followed by British annexation of the bay and the adjacent hinterland in 1778. (It was incorporated into Britain’s Cape Colony (now part of South Africa) in 1884, the same year in which Germany established the colony of South West Africa.).”
Other historians suggest Walvis Bay was a strong contender as a penal colony because it was marginally closer but ultimately lost out because there was less availability of arable land and the local inhabitants were less compliant compared to Botany Bay.
Some years ago I listened to a Dutch academic speculating on what Australia would be like if the Dutch had occupied and settled Australia. He admitted that, given their colonial record, they would have been as bad and possibly worse than the British in their treatment of Indigenous Australians. However, on a much lighter note he also speculated on whether Australia would have won a soccer World Cup.
And what about the Portuguese? and Spaniards?
Henry Reynolds’ contempt for the cheap jingoism fed to schoolchildren and Liberals by second-rate historians is well justified, but his anti-Cook advocacy is strained. I see a good person (who, incidentally, was dead by 1786) being spattered with dung thrown in tiresome, childish, arts-faculty culture wars. Even the jingoists leave out the aspects of Cook’s achievements that cement his place in history as not only a great navigator, but a great man of the Enlightenment. Extracts from his journal in Beaglehole’s biography show his care for the welfare of the native peoples of the Pacific to have been second only to that for the welfare of his crew. In 1776, James Cook received the Copley Medal of the Royal Society, which he shares with a majority of the great men and women of science over the centuries, for a paper on the diet he prescribed for his crews. The diet, which included sauerkraut, citrus, and as much fresh vegetables as possible, was the reason why he had returned from a round-the-world voyage in HMS Resolution without losing one crew member. That incredible feat at the time convinced the Royal Society of the importance of Cook’s contribution to the science of public health, in showing how scurvy could be beaten. It was a contribution to public health that a new belligerent in the tiresome culture wars, Victoria’s Deputy Chief Health Officer, has Buckleys’s chance of matching.
As you say, Henry – Morrison Madness re Cook has at least had the effect of opening up conversation and shedding more-and-more bright spotlights on the holes in the received “wisdom”! Thanks here for the references to Grotius and to the Dutch and the French. Years ago as I was teaching refugees out of south-east Asia I hunted for materials reflecting the presence of my Viet-namese and Chinese students in my classes. Hmm! Rex Ingamells – references to Cheng Ho (Zheng He) and a possible visit by him (or those in contact with him) on Australia’s northern shores during his fleet’s visit to Malacca, to Sri Lanka and on to East Africa at the start of the 15th century – over 350 years before Cook – over 200 years before the first Europeans on northern Australia. Years later beyond that in Japan – and noting that Rex Ingamells had also referred to possibilities of YAMADA Nagamasa (buccaneer) visiting northern/eastern parts of Australia – I wrote (1991) to his widow Eileen – then living in Southport, Qld. It is not necessary that either “Cheng Ho or YAMADA Nagamasa (early 18th century) visited Australia – the point being made by Ingamells – one of the founders of the Jindyworabak movement – Eileen referred to it as “Club” (Jindyworabak meaning to annex or join the meaning – of the Australian idiom to the Australian scene – the Anglo idiom to the Indigenous landscape/scene) was that this country’s history involved far more than most people could imagine – beyond that of its First Nations. See Ingamells: Great South Land 1951
Henry, I imagine you had penned this piece before a certain tweet brought on the debate which COVID-19 appeared to have sidelined!
Unfortunately, the debate is going along the lines you might have expected. The rabid right apoplectic at any suggestion that the sainted Captain Cook brought other than civilisation to the Antipodes. But certain sanctimonious progressives unable to understand that a tweet cannot include the nuances of a PhD thesis, and perhaps failing to see “Captain Cook” as a metonym for the British colonisation of Australia and what that meant for the indigenous inhabitants.