by Tony Horwitz
The town’s former convent—another hard-to-imagine institution—had become the James Cook Historical Museum. Despite its name, the museum contained little Cookiana, apart from one of the Endeavour’s anchors and a dusty diorama of a kangaroo and wallaby, intended to illustrate the ongoing debate over precisely which marsupial the English had seen (Macropus giganteus, or the great gray kangaroo, seems the likeliest candidate).
In another room I found a giant cauldron fitted with oars. This was a reproduction of the crude vessel in which a settler named Mary Watson had fled to sea in 1881 after Aborigines attacked a camp of sea-slug hunters on Lizard Island, near Cooktown. Rowing the pot, which also carried her infant son and a wounded Chinese workman, Mary beached it on a desert isle. Their decayed bodies were later found on the island, alongside a copy of Mary’s journal. “Nearly dead of thirst,” the last entry read. She was honored with a grand public funeral and a monument on the main street describing her as “the Heroine of Lizard Island.”
There was no presentation of the Aboriginal side of this story. The museum’s entire Aboriginal content consisted of a few spears, boomerangs, and chisels, piled on the floor beside handwritten cards. The racial sensitivity so obvious in Sydney had evidently failed to migrate this far north. And local Aborigines, whom Cook regarded as healthy and happy, now appeared neither. Most of those I’d seen in Cooktown were disheveled, rheumy-eyed men, rolling cigarettes in front of the West Coast Hotel.
At the town’s library, I learned that the Aborigines Cook encountered belonged to a tribe called the Guugu Yimidhirr. In 1873, at the start of the gold rush, they numbered about a thousand and lived much as they had when Cook arrived. Soon after the gold prospectors came, a newspaper correspondent wrote: “Cooktown is a wonderful place. Barely six months ago it was a camp for black-fellows. Presto! All is changed. A large town exists and not much is heard of the blacks.”
Most of the Aborigines had simply been driven from their land. Others resisted, though spears proved no match for breech-loading rifles. In late 1873, several hundred warriors faced off against government troopers at a site near Cooktown known as Battle Camp. The name was a grisly misnomer: most of the warriors were instantly slaughtered. Those who survived, reported a correspondent for the Cooktown Herald, “ran into large water holes for shelter, where they were shot.” There were no recorded white casualties.
When guerrilla attacks on prospectors continued, the Herald advocated “the complete repression of these pests” and “extermination if the poor blacks will not recognize the paramount influence of the law.” Guns weren’t the settlers’ only weapons. Aborigines had little resistance to Western disease, or to alcohol. Chinese immigrants introduced opium, which Aborigines consumed by mixing the drug’s ash with water and drinking it. The Guugu Yimidhirr, like many Aboriginal clans, appeared headed for extinction—a fate little mourned by white Australians. “The law of evolution says that the nigger shall disappear in the onward march of the white man,” a Queensland representative told the federal Australian parliament in 1901.
In the case of the Guugu Yimidhirr, it was Cook who proved their salvation, albeit indirectly. A German translation of Cook’s voyages inspired a young Bavarian, Johann Flierl, to set off in the 1880s “as a missionary to the most distant heathen land with its still quite untouched peoples.” He created a Lutheran mission near Cooktown that became a refuge for Aborigines. Flierl named the mission Elim, after an oasis the Israelites found during their exodus from Egypt. As oases went, Queensland’s Elim wasn’t much: a sandy, infertile patch north of Cooktown. But it grew into a stable community, and its school educated scores of Aborigines, some of whom became nationally prominent.
One such success story was Eric Deeral, who served in the 1970s as the first Aboriginal representative in Queensland’s parliament. I tracked him down late one afternoon at his daughter’s modest bungalow a few blocks from Cooktown’s main street. A small, very dark-skinned man, he met my knock at the door with a wary expression and a curt “May I help you?” When I burbled about my travels, his face widened into a welcoming smile. “Come in, come in, I love talking about Cook!” After several days of conversing about little except “ferals,” rooting crocodiles, and rugby league, it was a relief to find someone who shared my passion for the navigator.
Eric showed me into a small office he kept at the front of the bungalow. The bookshelf included several volumes about Cook. Like Johann Flierl, Eric had been fascinated since childhood by the image of first contact between Europeans and native peoples untouched by the West. He’d quizzed Aboriginal elders about stories they’d heard of Cook and his men. “At first, our people thought they were overgrown babies,” he said. Aboriginal newborns, Eric explained, are often much paler than adults. But once the Guugu Yimidhirr saw the newcomers’ power, particularly the noise and smoke from their guns, they came to believe the strangers were white spirits, or ghosts of deceased Aborigines. “Lucky for Cook, white spirits are viewed as benign,” Eric said. “If they’d been seen as dark spirits, my ancestors probably would have speared them.”
Eric flipped through Cook’s journal to the strange incident in which native men took umbrage at the sight of captive birds and turtles. “It’s no longer true that Aborigines live at one with the land, but in those days it was so,” Eric said. “The belief was that all creatures deserve life, each have a place in the world. If a bird or kangaroo got away when you were hunting, the attitude was ‘Good on him, he’s got his rights too.’ Also, you only hunted what you needed for that day; you didn’t take more than you needed.”
This probably explained why Aborigines had tried to free the birds on deck. As for the turtles, the creatures were highly prized by the Guugu Yimidhirr; only designated men could hunt them, and only at certain times and places. “In today’s terms, it was if the English had gone into a supermarket and pinched food from the shelves,” Eric said. He suspected that the men who set fire to the English camp were the tribe’s sanctioned turtle hunters, angered by what they saw as a violation of their laws. The same impulse probably prompted the attack, a century later, on Mary Watson’s camp at Lizard Island, both a sacred site and traditional hunting ground.
I asked Eric about another action that had puzzled the English. After the turtle incident, as the two sides restored peace, Banks wrote that a warrior “employd himself in collecting the moisture from under his arm pit with his finger which he every time drew through his mouth.” Eric laughed. “Even Blind Freddy knows what that means,” he said, deploying Australian slang. The armpit motion was a traditional gesture intended to calm warriors and protect them against harm and evil spirits.
Listening to Eric, I felt the giddy thrill of unlocking small mysteries that had been sealed inside the English journals for more than two centuries. Blind Freddy might know the answers, but no books I’d read had provided them. Eric ran his finger down the list of native words Parkinson had collected. “If you read closely, you can almost see these men, groping to understand each other,” he said. Yowall, for instance, meant beach, not sand, as Parkinson had written. “One of our men probably pointed across the river at the sandy shore on the other side,” Eric said. Similarly, wageegee meant scar, not head—perhaps the man who had told it to the English was pointing to a cut brow when he said the word.
As for kangooroo, this was a fair approximation of the Guugu Yimidhirr word, which Eric rendered gangurru. But Aborigines, unlike Maori and Tahitians, didn’t have a shared language; living in small, widely scattered groups, they spoke scores of different tongues. The English failed to recognize this. The result was a comically circular instance of linguistic transmission. Officers of the First Fleet, familiar with the Endeavour’s journals, used the words Cook and his men had collected in Queensland to try and communicate with Botany Bay Aborigines eighteen years later.
“Whatever animal is shown them,” a frustrated officer on the Fleet reported, “they call kangaroo.” Even the sight of English sheep and cattle promp
ted the Gwyeagal to cheerfully cry out “Kangaroo, kangaroo!” In fact, the Gwyeagal had no such word in their vocabulary (they called the marsupial patagorang). Rather, they’d picked up “kangaroo” from the English and guessed that it referred to all large beasts. So a word that originated with an encounter between Cook and a small clan in north Queensland traveled to England with the Endeavour, then back to Botany Bay with the First Fleet, and eventually became the universal name for Australia’s symbol. There was an added twist. The Guugu Yimidhirr had ten different words for the marsupials, depending on their size and color. “Gangurru means a large gray or black kangaroo,” Eric said. “If Cook had asked about a small red one, the whole world would be saying nharrgali today.”
At sunset, Eric took me to the top of Grassy Hill, the 530-foot knoll from which Cook had surveyed the surrounding countryside. The sweeping view of estuary and plain appeared unchanged—except for the matter of perspective. Cook, eager for provisions, found it an “indifferent prospect.” To me, the “barren and stoney” hills he described seemed wonderfully scenic and empty, and the lowland “over run with mangroves” was a lovely river valley carpeted in green shag. Cook later returned to this summit to plot the ship’s eventual return to sea. “I saw what gave me no small uneasiness,” he wrote of the coral shoals extending as far as his spyglass could see. The “Grand Reef,” as Banks called it, was dread-inspiring to the English—and now a magnet for tourists in scuba gear and glass-bottomed boats.
Through Eric’s eyes, the view took on an entirely different aspect. Every feature told a Dreamtime saga about the creatures that had formed this landscape. For instance, when a black bird called Dyirimadhi threw a rock at the scrub python, Mungurru, the snake, wound down the hills to the sea, creating the serpentine path of the Endeavour River. The landscape also told a much grimmer, man-made story. Eric pointed to a small branch of the river, Poison Creek, so called because a white storekeeper put strychnine in flour, killing sixty Guugu Yimidhirr. Near it ran Leprosy Creek, the site of a quarantine station. “Over there,” he added, pointing at a bluff, “some of our people speared two Europeans who took cedar logs we used to make canoes. The town sent troopers, who shot all but four of the clan, twenty-six people in all.”
Eric told me about these incidents without apparent rancor. This was characteristic of most Aborigines I’d met, apart from a few urban activists. While Maori held to a powerful sense of grievance, and never hesitated to express it, Aborigines tended to be private and undemonstrative about their pain. When I mentioned this to Eric, he smiled and said, “Our man Cook wrote about that, too. The Maori were fierce people—still are. I think Cook’s word for us was ‘inoffensive.’” He paused, kicking at the grass. “Maybe if we’d been more like the Maori we’d be better off today.”
We walked down the hill in the dark. Eric gave me the name of a cousin who still lived near the site of the Lutheran mission of Elim, a community now known as Hopevale. “Have you got a good sturdy car?” he asked. I nodded. “You’ll probably make it, then.” He smiled. “If you don’t, stay clear of the water. There’s been a few folks taken this year.”
The next night, I attended a reception for local officials and festival organizers at the Sovereign, the pub I’d been told was the “snob” hangout. Curious to glimpse the upper crust of Cooktown society, I donned a coat and tie and arrived just in time to hear a short speech by the Honourable Warren Entsch, who represented north Queensland in the Australian parliament. Clad in casual slacks and an open shirt, he tossed back a drink while giving his own version of the Endeavour’s visit.
“Jimmy Cook wasn’t interested in Sydney. He took a leak over the side and sailed on. But when he got here and saw the good-looking sheilas and friendly blokes, he tied up for two months and blew his credit giving away beads and having a good time. He had to explain to the queen why he’d spent all his money, so he cooked up the story about running on the reef. It was all a pack of lies.”
The crowd roared with applause. After the speech, I joined Warren as he refilled his drink, and gently noted that the British sovereign at the time was a king. He shrugged. “Even if he was a king he was probably a queen, if you know what I mean. He was English, after all.”
Warren’s parliamentary district encompassed roughly 100,000 square miles, an area almost twice the size of England. He was a good match for his frontier constituency: a crocodile farmer and cattle grazer who combined conservative views with a diamond stud earring, lewd tattoos, and a disdain for the “pack of hyenas” and “bloody sewer rats” who served with him in Canberra. “You’ve got to be one of the people up here, you can’t be a stuffie,” he said. “If anyone tries to talk to me about politics, I tell them to piss off.”
Warren said he’d last visited Cooktown during the run-up to the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney, when organizers of the torch relay across Australia decided to skirt the far north of Queensland because it was too remote. This so enraged Warren that he’d sponsored an alternative Olympics in Cooktown, called the Complete Relaxation Games. Events included chair sleeping, wave watching, and synchronized drinking. The Cooktown Games even had an Olympic-style scandal. “We had to disqualify some participants in the armchair-sleeping competition because they’d been on the grog,” Warren said. “In that event, alcohol’s a performance-enhancing drug.”
Warren turned to greet another man: Rob Buck, who played Cook during the annual reenactment of the Endeavour’s landing. Standing about five foot nine, with red-rimmed eyes and the beginning of a beer belly, Rob didn’t much resemble the captain. “Cook probably wore platform shoes,” he said of the height difference. “It was the seventies, after all.”
“You mean the 1770s,” I said.
“Whatever.”
The reenactment, in its thirty-seventh year, remained an improvised affair. “There’s a script, but I usually forget my lines,” Rob said. The previous year, he’d gone blank at the moment when he was supposed to tell his men to gather water and firewood. “So I ended up saying, ‘Lieutenant Hicks, get your men to do some stuff.’” He shrugged. “Most of the crowd was too far gone to notice.”
The reenactment also had a shifting cast. A mainstay of the troupe once failed to show up because “he was on holiday at the Queen’s request,” Rob said; in other words, in prison, for possession of drugs. Another lost his part due to “lead poisoning,” meaning he’d shot himself. Also, since the reenactment came on the last day of the festival, it inevitably suffered from AWOL sailors: men too hung over to show up. This gave me an idea. I asked Rob if Roger and I might serve as fill-ins.
Rob smiled. “See how you feel come Sunday morning.” Then he told me where to meet the reenactors: at eight-thirty A.M. in a garage behind the police station. “We may have to spring a few blokes to fill out the crew.”
Eric Deeral hadn’t exaggerated when warning me about the drive to the Aboriginal settlement at Hopevale. Several miles from Cooktown, the highway dwindled to an unpaved track winding into the wilds of the Cape York Peninsula. The few vehicles coming the other way looked like lunar landing craft, emerging from dust clouds with spare tires, jerry cans of petrol and water, and other life-support systems strapped to the roof. They had their headlights switched on to navigate the murk, and snorkel-like tubes extruding from the hood so the engine could suck in air if the rest of the car was submerged. The only other signs of life during the hour-long drive were the towering termite hills that Banks and Solander described. To me they looked less druidical than dunglike, as if deposited by a dyspeptic elephant.
Hopevale, which lay well off this “road,” seemed at first an outback mirage. It looked like a modest outer suburb of Sydney: traffic roundabouts, tidy rows of corrugated-roof bungalows, and gardens splashed with bougainvillea and frangipani, as well as Hills Hoists, the rotating clotheslines that are as ubiquitous in Australian backyards as barbecues. A small shopping mall anchored one side of the settlement, a Lutheran church the other.
On closer inspect
ion, Hopevale had the air of a rural encampment. Between the clusters of houses lay large patches of open ground filled with horse droppings and fleabitten dogs. People gathered around small, open fires. I found Eric’s cousin, George Rosedale, sitting on a rickety chair in front of his sister’s house. White-haired, with thick glasses, he had the distinctive physique of many Aborigines I’d met: long, thin legs that seemed birdlike when paired with his barrel chest and large, square head. A black dog curled beside his bare feet.
George greeted me with a cheerful “G’day, mate.” But beneath the Aussie slang I caught a discernible German accent. Missionaries only recently arrived from Europe had educated George, a few years older than his cousin, and he’d later become a Lutheran pastor.
In other places I’d visited, Tahiti in particular, Christianity had proved a mixed blessing at best, displacing and in some cases destroying native belief and culture. But when I asked George about this, he said the Aboriginal experience was different. Elsewhere in the Pacific, Christianity preceded colonialism. “By the time the missionaries arrived here,” George said, “much worse damage had already been done.”