by Mark Mckenna
By early July, the ship was almost ready. As Banks realised, having tried for so long to get in to the river mouth, they now had to turn their minds to ‘how we should get out of this place’. Climbing Grassy Hill, he was confronted with the ‘melancholy’ prospect that they would again be wrecked attempting to leave. ‘Innumerable shoals’ as far as he could see, no ‘straight passage out’, and a ‘trade wind’ that blew directly in their ‘teeth’. Like Cook, he wondered if they would ever ‘escape’. Resigned to waiting until the conditions were ideal, Banks returned to his collecting. Meanwhile, he discussed the natives’ shyness with Cook. He thought them timid and cowardly for not coming forward. So much of their behaviour mystified him. Cook, too, was unable to understand why they failed to harvest the ‘shell fish and other small fish’ which were easily caught at low tide ‘in holes in the rocks’. Perhaps their canoes would not take them ‘so far out to sea’. How was it possible after three weeks here that curiosity alone did not cause them to show themselves?
On 10 July, the stand-off was finally broken. Close to where the Endeavour was still moored, four Guugu Yimithirr men landed their canoe and stood on the beach with their spears. With reassuring signs, Tupia, Cook’s mercurial Tahitian cultural broker, tactfully managed to persuade them to lay down their arms and sit with him on the ground. Cook soon joined them, struck immediately by their ‘soft and tuneable voices’ and striking talent for mimicry. Within a matter of minutes they could pronounce English words perfectly. Although they declined to stay with them for ‘dinner’, they would now return daily, exchanging fish, receiving ‘cloth nails and paper’ (with which they remained distinctly unimpressed) and even introducing one man—a ‘preposterous’ bone ‘as thick as a man’s finger’ placed through his nose—by name: ‘Yaparico’.95 Over the coming days, while Cook’s men busied themselves harvesting green sea turtles weighing up to ‘three hundred pound’, a kind of trust seemed to be established, although no-one on board the Endeavour had any idea why the Guugu Yimithirr had suddenly decided to engage with them. Women and children still kept their distance but came closer than before. At ‘200 yards’, Banks was now able to play the voyeur, using his telescope to observe that the women were ‘as naked as the day they were born’. ‘Even those parts which I always thought nature would have taught a woman to conceal’, he wrote almost longingly, ‘were uncovered’.
On the morning of 18 July, after eight days of friendly relations, everything changed. ‘Several of the natives’ who had now become ‘more familiar than ever’ came on board the Endeavour. Convinced that they had become their ‘very good friends’, Cook and Banks left the ship for several hours to ascend ‘Rocky Mount’, about ten kilometres away. Returning yet again with the sombre news that they would have to thread their way through treacherous shoals if they were to reach the open sea, they were told by one of the officers that while they were gone, the ‘natives’ had ‘taken more notice’ of the ship’s haul of twelve green sea turtles than anything else on board. These were the same turtles that all Cook’s men agreed ‘tasted’ much better than anything ‘in England’. Soon after Cook and Banks came back on deck, the men left, already discussing their next move. The following morning almost a dozen Guugu Yimithirr men returned to the ship bringing their spears with them, the largest number of weapons Banks had yet seen them carry. Placing the spears in a tree and leaving a man and boy to guard them, they then came on board the ship. They had come to insist on their fair share of Cook’s harvest, immediately demanding ‘some’ of the turtles on the deck. When Cook refused, they dragged two turtles to the gangway with the intention of throwing them ‘over the side’ into their canoe. When they were restrained, they showed ‘great signs of resentment’. One man, asking Banks directly for turtle and being refused, stamped his foot indignantly and pushed Banks away. Cook watched as they tried to grab anything they could from the deck and throw it overboard. As the conflict escalated, Cook offered them bread, which they ‘rejected with scorn’. Turtle was the only thing they wanted. ‘All in an instant’ they ‘leapt into their canoe’ and headed for the shore where Cook had left the ‘forge and a sow and a litter of young pigs’. Although Cook and Banks got there before them, they were surprised by the swiftness of the attack that followed.
‘Taking fire from under a pitch kettle which was boiling’ the Guugu Yimithirr quickly set fire to the grass, which was ‘4 or 5 feet high’ and ‘to windward’ of the few things they had left ashore. As ‘dry as a stubble’, the grass burnt ‘with vast fury’. Banks realised that his tent would soon go up in flames, only just managing to save it in time. One of the ‘young pigs’, however, was ‘scorched to death in the fire’. Before they had time to regroup, several Guugu Yimithirr men ran to a point on the beach where Cook’s crew were doing their washing. Fishing nets and ‘linen’ lay drying on the sand. Cook pursued them. Once again, he was unable to stop them from setting fire to the grass. Threats and pleas went unheeded. Without any firearms, Cook ran back to their campsite and retrieved his musket. Banks already had his musket ‘loaded with shot’ and together they raced along the beach to the washing place to find the flames ‘spreading like wild fire’. At 40 yards (35 metres) distance, Cook fired his musket, hitting one man who immediately dropped his firestick and ran away, along with the rest of his comrades. Determined to intimidate them, Cook reloaded his musket and fired again, this time in the direction of the mangroves where they had run. They were soon out of sight. On the beach, Cook noticed ‘a few drops of blood’ on the linen, presuming that the man he had shot must have been ‘a little hurt’.
After struggling to put the fires out, Banks was dismayed to ‘hear their voices returning’. Fearing that they would employ the same tactics, and ‘anxious’ for the handful of people still washing on the shore, he ran back with Cook. As soon as the Guugu Yimithirr saw Cook, Banks and ‘3 or 4’ others with their muskets raised and brandishing six or seven spears that Cook had ‘seized’, they became extremely ‘alarmed’ and ‘all made off’, but not before an ‘old man’ came towards them and said something they ‘could not understand’. Eager to resolve the conflict, Banks and Cook decided to follow them for about a mile, finally resting on some high rocks on the southern shores of the harbour where they hoped to be able to monitor their movements. Hearing them calling out, the Guugu Yimithirr men sat down a little less than 100 metres away, each party cautiously observing the other. Then, without being prompted, a ‘little old man … came forward’ carrying a spear ‘without a point’. As he walked towards them, he halted several times, ‘collecting moisture from under his armpit with his finger’ and drawing it ‘through his mouth’. Cook and Banks ‘beckoned him’ to come closer. At this point, the old man turned to his comrades who ‘laid their lances against a tree’. Then, slowly, they all came forward to meet them. Both Banks and Cook noticed that their party consisted of three or four men who they had not seen before. One by one, the men they already knew introduced the strangers ‘by name’. After giving them some ‘trinkets’ and returning their spears, which Cook claimed ‘reconciled everything’, they all walked together back towards the ship, which was only a few hundred metres away, the Guugu Yimithirr ‘making signs as they came along that they would not set fire to the grass again’, Banks and Cook handing them musket balls and ‘by our signs explaining their effect’. For all of this time, as they made their signs to one another, both parties continued to speak. Cook remarked on the ‘unintelligible conversation’, each person compelled to speak in their own tongue despite the fact that most of the words they uttered could not be understood. When they arrived at the ship, the Guugu Yimithirr declined to come on board, staying on the beach for a couple of hours before they were gone. Perhaps they did not want to face seeing the turtles again.
Reflecting on the experience, Banks was surprised at the ‘fury’ of the grass fires they had lit and how hard they had been to extinguish. Only hours after the Guugu Yimithirr had left, Banks and Cook watched as the
country around them, about two miles away, was again set ablaze. From that moment until their departure a few weeks later, they would have no further meaningful contact with the Guugu Yimithirr. The memory of the fires that day stayed with them forever. Banks determined that he would never again pitch a tent in ‘such a hot climate’ without first burning the surrounding grass. In 1819, when Phillip Parker King landed in the same place at precisely the same time of year, the first thing he did was to set fire to the grass around his campsite. It was necessary, he explained, ‘to avoid a repetition of the revengeful and mischievous trick which the natives formerly played [on] Captain Cook’. King did not have to wait as long as Cook to make contact with the Guugu Yimithirr. Only one day after he arrived, he met a group of men in the bush. Persuading ‘an old man’ to lead his friends towards his tent on the beach, King walked with them. But ‘the moment they saw the cutter’s mast through the trees they stopped’. As hard as King tried, they ‘could not be prevailed upon to advance a step further; and, after devoting some time in watching us from the hills, walked away’.
The old man who stopped at the first sight of King’s vessel may well have met Cook and Banks forty-nine years earlier. The story the Guugu Yimithirr had kept alive in their oral tradition of their meeting with the strange visitors contained traces of apprehension, curiosity and the possibility of friendship. But this was all in the knowledge that the visitors would ultimately leave their Country. Uncannily, aspects of King’s encounter with the Guugu Yimithirr echoed those of Cook. As some of his crew were washing their clothes, about a dozen men approached them. Tentatively, they exchanged greetings, but when one of the sailors attempted to comb the hair of a young Aboriginal boy, an old man became ‘violently enraged’ and the others ‘armed themselves with stones’. Finally, the old man was led away and ‘peace was thus restored’. The following day, 2 July, spears and musket fire were exchanged after some of King’s men had refused to take off all of their clothes in front of the Guugu Yimithirr. What began hopefully had ended in mistrust. King placed sentries on night watch and a ‘masthead watch’ by day. When he returned in 1820, finding the carpenter’s bench that had been used to build his boat standing on the beach just as he had left it one year earlier, he noticed ‘five natives standing about forty or fifty yards off among the high grass’. As soon as they realised King’s party had spotted them, ‘they began to repeat the word itchew (friend) and to pat their breasts, thereby intimating that their visit had no hostile motive’. Exchanging their ‘throwing sticks’ for ‘Indian Corn’, the Guugu Yimithirr beckoned King to walk inland with them but he was ‘unwilling to trust’ his small party to ‘their power’. Shortly after King sailed away, the ‘country towards the back of the harbour’ was ‘set on fire’, almost as if, in some kind of ritual cleansing, the presence of those who came from the sea in the white birds would be eternally erased from the land. Exactly how the Guugu Yimithirr connected King with Cook will probably never be known. Perhaps they became one. In the years ahead, few would remember King’s landings in 1819 and 1820. The tree in which he had carved the Mermaid’s name went unremembered. All the attention would fall on the Endeavour, the ‘founding’ story that remained largely unchanged, read from the journals of Banks and Cook like holy script.96
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When Cooktown was mentioned in the southern press in the twentieth century, it was usually seen as an exotic, out-of-the-way destination, a place on the edge of civilisation: the town at the ‘end of the road’.97 As the potential for tourism emerged, Cooktown and the entire Cape York Peninsula were spoken of as a region of ‘savage emptiness’—an area ‘the size of England and Scotland combined’—in which only a handful of ‘white people’ lived. ‘Nobody seems to know much about it’, exclaimed one journalist in 1954, ‘even school teachers are vague’.98 Nature lovers enthused about ‘Birds of Paradise’, ‘brilliant but microscopic sun birds’, giant moths and climbing kangaroos. The peninsula was seen as a ‘lost world’, a ‘land of mystery’ where ‘little [had] changed since the Aboriginal dreamtime’.99 Many of the first advocates of Cape York’s wilderness unintentionally found new ways to remove Aboriginal people from the land. For those who made the trek, the town’s origins were palpable. As late as 1990, visitors remarked that Cooktown retained ‘the air of a frontier town’.100
Cooktown memorial erected in 1988 to ‘Captain James Cook’, 2016, close to where he beached the Endeavour
In 1959, spurred by the knowledge that the Cooktown to Palmer River railway line, which had operated for nearly eighty years, would soon close, the new Cooktown Tourist Development League turned to history in a bid to boost the economy and save the town from a slow but certain death. The publication of the league’s tourist booklet, ‘Cooktown, Queensland’s Most Historic Town’, which was distributed all along Queensland’s coast, saw the beginning of organised ‘tours’. One history in particular, it seemed, had the potential to attract visitors to the town: the story of James Cook and the Endeavour. It was decided that an annual re-enactment of Cook’s landing would take place, ‘not only for the benefit of the community, but also to encourage Australians generally, to reflect upon their heritage’. Although Cook’s story had been commemorated in earlier years with parades and ‘procession floats’, no formal commemoration had occurred since the 1920s.101 The first re-enactments of the landing in the 1960s were well received, but one occasion—the 1970 visit of Queen Elizabeth II, Prince Philip and Princess Anne for the bicentenary of Cook’s ‘discovery’ of Australia—elevated the significance of the story and proved a boon for Cooktown’s heritage and tourist industry.
The publicity surrounding the royal visit placed Cooktown on the map. Hearing of the discovery of the Endeavour’s cannons, states competed for their share of ‘relics’, eager to have a tangible connection to the story in time for the bicentenary, although not every politician was excited by the impending celebrations. When Prime Minister John Gorton excluded Victoria from the list of six recipients of the Endeavour’s cannons, the Royal Historical Society of Victoria protested vigorously. They had little support from the state’s Premier, Sir Henry Bolte, who declared that he would rather have ‘an extra cash handout from Canberra than a cannon from Cooktown’.102 Money that had long been hard to extract from federal and Queensland governments to develop the far north suddenly became available. In preparation for the royal visit, the town was ‘tidied up’, which included the destruction of the old Chinese joss house. Even today, many of Cooktown’s vacant blocks that can be seen from Grassy Hill are memorials to the enthusiastic bulldozing of ‘untidy’ old buildings in 1969. Fortunately, other heritage buildings were saved that year. With the support of the Catholic Church and the National Trust, Cooktown’s residents rescued the old St Mary’s Convent from demolition and secured the necessary funds from the Queensland government for its restoration and establishment as the ‘James Cook Museum’, which was opened by the Queen in April 1970.103
Queen Elizabeth was already well practised in Cook speech-making before she arrived in Cooktown. Cook and Banks featured in almost every public address she delivered en route. At Botany Bay, for the re-enactment of Cook’s landing at Kurnell, she lauded their enterprise and courage without once mentioning their interaction with the Gweagal. At Mount Isa she praised the pioneers: ‘gradually they tamed the land and built permanent homes’. In what became almost a ritual reclaiming of the continent, the royal yacht Britannia followed the Endeavour’s course north along the coast, finally dropping anchor just over three kilometres from the mouth of the Endeavour River on the morning of 22 April 1970. The annual re-enactment, normally performed in June to coincide with the time of Cook’s arrival, was brought forward especially for the occasion. After arriving on the ‘royal barge’, the ‘royal party’ watched the re-enactment of the landing performed by actors in ‘full-period costume’ from a dais on the beach close to where Cook had landed almost two hundred years earlier. Forty-one Torres Strait Islanders san
g and performed a ‘mock battle and war dance’ to complete the ceremony. There were few residents of the town or the surrounding region who were not there to see ‘the royals’. Over fifty trucks brought people from Hope Vale alone.104
After a brisk ‘motor tour of the town’ and opening the James Cook Museum and the Sir Joseph Banks Garden, the Queen was back on the royal yacht within little more than two hours, telling Queensland’s Minister for Tourism that she had had an ‘absolutely fascinating morning … one of the most exciting’ she had spent in the country so far—Cooktown was ‘so different’, she exclaimed.105 Although she had earlier told the Melbourne media that Princess Anne was ‘beginning to feel the spell of this vigorous country’, her daughter seemed slightly enervated by the tropical north.106 Ettie, Lady Morris, wife of Queensland’s Deputy Premier Sir Kenneth Morris, who ‘looked after’ the princess in Cooktown that morning, remembered how she had curtly asked: ‘Whose house was that before it was a Museum?’ Morris politely explained that it had not been someone’s ‘house’ but was instead a convent. ‘She wasn’t a very happy girl’, Morris recalled in 1983, but ‘she looks much better now’.107 The frenzy of activity to prepare Cooktown for two crowded hours of royalty’s presence had almost exhausted its citizens. Cooktown was ‘getting over the Queen’ but it was not yet over Cook.108
Queen Elizabeth II on the steps of the new James Cook Museum, April 1970
By the late 1970s, the re-enactment had become a catalyst for the much larger Discovery Festival held at the same time each June. Every year, the matron from Cooktown Hospital drove out to Hope Vale to bring the Aboriginal performers taking part in the re-enactment into town. Although the organisers involved the Aboriginal community from the beginning, and claimed to have a ‘close liaison’ with them, in the first re-enactments, the story was told of how Cook ‘met and overcame an attack by the Aborigines’.109 Carrying their spears, they retreated before his superior presence. Alberta Hornsby remembered Gertie Deeral telling her husband (Eric’s brother) in the 1970s: ‘if you take part in the re-enactment our marriage is over’. Some Aboriginal women, she explained, ‘objected to their husbands being asked to stand in public in their jocks’.110 They thought it demeaned them. Remarkably, at a time in the late twentieth century when re-enacting Cook’s landing at Kurnell was seen as highly insensitive to Indigenous Australians, the re-enactment in Cooktown continued without serious protest, perhaps because the Discovery Festival became the major event. Activities organised for the festival reflected the general tenor of proceedings: ‘Pie eating and Coke drinking’, ‘Iron Person (physical and gastronomical)’, ‘spear throwing’, the ‘goanna pull’, ‘crab-tying’, ‘cream cake eating’, a ‘wet T-Shirt competition’ and a prize for the ‘best-dressed esky’. It was a carnival atmosphere: mock tournaments, pantomime and copious quantities of booze.111 The story of James Cook’s 7-week stay at Endeavour River was lost somewhere in the haze of festivities. And it would remain that way until the early 2000s, when the re-enactment, and the history of Cooktown’s founding, was dramatically transformed through the close collaboration of Eric Deeral, actor John MacDonald, Alberta Hornsby and Loretta Sullivan, president of the Cooktown Re-enactment Association.