Hollandia Nova detecta 1644 (New Holland discovered in 1644), published in Melchisedech Thevenot’s Relations de Divers Voyages Curieux (Tales of Various Strange Voyages) in 1663. Although the north, south and western coasts of Australia had been charted and Abel Tasman had contributed two squiggles in Van Diemen’s land, the eastern coast was a blank page on European maps of the time.
National Library of Australia, MAP NK 2785
New Holland hadn’t been completely ignored by the outside world, of course. Besides the Dutch and other early voyages of European exploration, there’s extensive evidence, dating back to at least the middle of the eighteenth century, documenting regular visitations by Macassan fishermen along the northern coast from the south-west corner of Sulawesi. They came to Australia to harvest sea cucumbers and trade with the Yolgnu people, leaving behind the remnants of processing plants and stands of imported tamarind trees.
A discovery in the Northern Territory’s Wessel Islands hints at other, perhaps much more far-reaching contact between Australia and distant lands across the sea – a small cache of Arabicinscribed twelfth-century coins from the medieval African sultanate of Kilwa, which have only twice been found outside Tanzania. The Yolngu people of north-eastern Arnhem Land also tell tales of men with white skin coming from the sea wearing ‘mirrors’, presumably armour, and beating stones on the beach to make metal. Ancient rock art on Marchinbar Island, where the Kilwa coins were discovered, shows ships under sail and figures thought to depict European sailors wearing hats and trousers.
That’s without even touching on the contested theory that the Portuguese charted Australia’s east coast in the sixteenth-century, reaching as far south as Warrnambool in Victoria, where one of the expedition’s caravels is thought to have foundered and ended up lost in the sand dunes. To this day the locals tell of ‘the Mahogany Ship’ that periodically appears in the shifting dunes. Some believe that because Cook wrote in his journal that the harbour in Queensland where he would take refuge after grounding on the Great Barrier Reef was ‘much smaller than I had been told’ it meant he had seen a copy of a map that purports to record the Portuguese discoveries and knew he would find an anchorage on the coast.
Even if we only accept what is known to be historical fact, Cook knew the continent was anything but unknown to the outside world when he arrived. The point he was headed for in New Holland was well documented in Dalrymple’s book. As Cook sailed west, he was aiming for the land recorded by Abel Tasman in 1642; the island we now know as Tasmania. But fierce winds drove the Endeavour off course. When land was sighted on 19 April 1770, it wasn’t Tasmania; it was land near the promontory they named Point Hicks, which extended into the Tasman Sea.
Cook fought his way north, charting the Australian coastline as he went. His priority was to get it over and done with as quickly as possible. His ship was in terrible shape, and the sooner they arrived in Batavia, the better. But this was important work – he was laying claim to this land in the name of the King. To do that, Cook needed to chart it.
But the Tasman Sea wasn’t going to make it easy for him. Towering waves and hideous weather kept the Endeavour at sea. Cook had to be happy with naming landmarks remotely and mapping from the deck of a ship that bucked and heaved in the fierce seas. But there was more to come. As the Endeavour travelled up the coast from Point Hicks, the men saw a series of waterspouts between the boat and the shore.
A fundamental Aboriginal belief is the connection between natural phenomena and the spirit world. As far as the locals were concerned, the waterspouts were messages from the spirit world, as were the impassable waves and angry winds that kept pushing the British ships away from land . . . ‘Stay away.’ But, of course, Cook didn’t read the signals.
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It had been over five hundred kilometres since Point Hicks was sighted and all attempts to make it to shore had been foiled. Cook had had enough. Determined to set foot on land, whether the land and the locals wanted it or not, on Saturday, 28 April 1770 Cook dropped anchor two miles off the coast near Woonona, now a suburb of the city of Wollongong.
From the deck, the crew could see a group of four or five men walking briskly along the shore. Two of them carried a small canoe on their shoulders. Would this be the moment the locals decided to make contact?
But this was not Tahiti. This was not New Zealand. Here, there would be no grand reception or fleet of canoes, warriors and women paddling out to greet them.
Undoubtedly a little disappointed, Cook, Banks, Tupaia and the naturalist, Daniel Solander, climbed aboard the ship’s yawl and made for shore to force the issue. But again, conditions were against them. The surf pounded the small boat, and the men were forced to retreat to the mothership.
Cook wanted to meet the locals, but it appeared the feeling wasn’t reciprocated. He could see they were there – all the way along the eastern Australian coastline, Cook made frequent note of the fires he saw inland. He already knew the continent was inhabited and assumed the fires were for cooking. What he didn’t, and couldn’t possibly, realise was that to Indigenous Australians, fire meant something a whole lot more than a means to heat up dinner and keep chilly nights at bay.
The first hint of what was going on can be found in the Endeavour’s journals. Cook spoke of the ‘woods’ they could see on land as ‘free from under wood of every kind’, and hills ‘chequered with lawns’. The voyage’s artist, Sydney Parkinson, described the landscape as like a ‘gentleman’s park’.
Similar observations were made by the early European settlers who marvelled at the ‘tame’ Australian landscape, thinking it a natural phenomenon.
As anyone who has spent any time in the Australian bush can confirm, the last word you’d use to describe it is ‘tame’. The undergrowth is as dense and fractious as steel wool and stands of young saplings grow so close together that weaving between them is like trying to find your way through the teeth of a fine hair-comb. It’s difficult to see these poetic descriptions of Australia’s landscape as anything other than the delusions of a boatload of men who had spent way too long at sea. But that wasn’t the case at all. They were describing exactly what they saw.
The men on board the Endeavour and those who came after didn’t realise it, but they were describing a farm. They were seeing, without seeing. The entire continent was managed and maintained by the people living there.
BRUCE PASCOE
They were trying to deny Aboriginal agency in the landscape, trying to deny Aboriginal possession of the soil, and probably trying to deny that Aboriginal people were intelligent enough to produce these systems. That was all so they could steal the land in the first place.
The open land they described was anything but accidental. Ecology – the understanding of all living organisms and their relationship to each other – was a cornerstone of Aboriginal beliefs and governance.
And central to that was the use of fire to generate new vegetation, clean water, fresh air and manage hunting stocks.
ROD MASON, Dharawal Nation, Cultural Teacher
Our number one law is fire; then wind and rain. They are the three laws of country. We believe we made this country. We create new country all the time through these practices.
Aboriginal land management started with the first fires of the season, opening up the hunting grounds and laying the foundation for the control of food sources. Clearing the undergrowth meant that edible plants and animals weren’t destroyed in out-of-control, wild bushfires of the sort known all too well in modern Australia; carefully set and supervised fires were used to hunt and lure game. The Aboriginal farmers used their knowledge to make resources abundant and predictable by establishing a circuit of hunting and harvesting grounds. It was a labour-intensive process that was highly specialised. Indigenous fire plans involved processes including burying leaves and grasses to create carbon potash and enrich the soil. It was hard work. But it created a land of great abundance.
Australia had grain crops, enormous tille
d paddocks of yams, and permanent fish and eel trapping systems. The problem was that Cook and his men – and the British settlers who arrived after them to take possession of Aboriginal lands – were unable to recognise Aboriginal cultural practices for what they were because they were so unfamiliar to them.
BRUCE PASCOE
Aboriginal people lost their ability to grow the crops because they lost the land. The hard-hoofed animals were destroying the soil by compacting it and drinking all the water. So the Aboriginal ability to continue managing the land had been compromised. They were constantly harassed and driven off their land. It happened all over Australia. We’re talking about blaming Cook, but I blame his boss. I don’t see Cook as the devil. I blame the Crown. I just see Cook as an Englishman with that mindset of the Englishmen – they believed they could possess anything the world had to offer.
Cook even saw Aboriginal fire setting and described it in his journal. But he couldn’t understand its purpose.
CAPTAIN JAMES COOK
They produce fire with great facility, and spread it in a wonderful manner . . . We have often seen one of them run along the shore, to all appearance with nothing in his hand, who stooping down for a moment, at a distance of every fifty or a hundred yards, left fire behind him . . . we saw him wrap up a small spark in dry grass, which, when he had run a little way, having been fanned by the air that his motion produced, began to blaze.
Fire and burning to generate life and new growth? Really? To a European way of thinking, the fact that most Australian flora requires fire to regenerate and stay healthy would have been utterly incomprehensible.
The point is that Aboriginal people were not just wandering the countryside, exploiting natural resources as they found them. This was not ‘hunter-gathering’. This was farming.
But how could Cook have missed something as obvious as effective land management practices on such a large scale? Was it because Cook and the other early arrivals landed in Australia with very low expectations of the people they expected to find there?
DR PETER MEIHANA, Massey University, Ngāti Kuia, Ngāti Apa, Rangitāne, Ngāi Tahu Tribes, Tribal Historian
Cook was part of that generation of explorers who adhered to the Enlightenment model that placed societies on a scale, based on their means of subsistence. As Aboriginal people were deemed to be hunter-gatherers, they were at the bottom of that scale. Those involved in agriculture were higher on the scale because everything was measured by European standards. The aim was to move from hunter-gatherer to agriculturalist to industrialist.
First-time European visitors to lands that were unfamiliar to them tended to place more stock in the accounts of other Western travellers than they did their own observations. Just as most modern tourists expect flamenco dancing and paella in Madrid and berets and baguettes in Paris, more often than not, early European navigators like Cook arrived on foreign shores with a firm idea of what they’d find and what to expect from the local inhabitants when they got there. Whether or not that tallied with the multi-faceted and complex reality of the cultures they encountered had little bearing on their perceptions – they arrived with a fairly unshakeable, and often utterly inaccurate, preconception of the place and people they were visiting. And the only account Cook had of the Indigenous inhabitants of Australia came from the English privateer, William Dampier, who had visited the western coastline in 1688 and described the local inhabitants as ‘the miserablest people in the world’.
WILLIAM DAMPIER (1651–1715), English Explorer and Privateer
Setting aside their human shape, they differ but little from brutes . . . The colour of their skins, both of their faces and the rest of their body, is coal-black . . . They all of them have the most unpleasant looks and the worst features of any people that ever I saw, though I have seen a great variety of savages.
Unfortunately we don’t have a record of what the Dampier Peninsula’s Bardi people thought of him. But considering he was a sallow-skinned and wispy-haired man who had been at sea for two years, it would be nice to think their assessment of him was just as uncharitable.
Whatever the reasons for the wilful blindness towards Aboriginal Australians and their connection to and custodianship of the land, it’s a great deal easier to justify dispossessing a people if you don’t think they have much attachment to the land you’re taking.
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Although the Dharawal people of Botany Bay couldn’t have known what Cook’s arrival on 29 April 1770 would mean for their country, they did know he was coming.
ROD MASON
They were asking themselves, what is this thing coming up the coast? The news travelled faster than a bushfire . . . My people were watching Cook for days, always wondering when and where they were going to land. We were ready. We were waiting for it.
Because in Australia, the other thing fire was useful for – besides farming – was smoke signals. As Cook tacked to and fro along the coast, he was being watched. For days, the clans communicated with each other using a method not dissimilar to Morse code.
DR SHAYNE WILLIAMS, Dharawal Nation, Senior Cultural Knowledge Holder
We were sending messages to one another with smoke, using different kinds of leaves to produce different colours. The Aboriginal people here knew that the vessel was on the way well before it got even halfway here.
This method of communication was a specialised art – only elders initiated in the practice could make and translate the messages.
The Dharawal language group extended from the southern end of Botany Bay – or Kamay – as far south as Jervis Bay and inland along the Georges River. It was to the clan’s ‘safe camp’ near Campbelltown on the Georges River that most of the community retreated when it became clear the Endeavour was entering the bay. Hidden from view, the community leaders watched the ship sail past from caves set in the cliff at Tabbagai.
ROD MASON
There were different jobs for different people within the clan; those who were hunters, those who were gatherers, tradespeople, fire men . . . But we sent our warriors down to the beach that day. They were our ‘policemen’. They shouted, ‘Warra Warra Wai!’ They were explaining . . . ‘We have been watching you! Go away!’
Deciding to take a different tack from the one he employed on his first landing in New Zealand, Cook resolved to avoid the shore where the locals seemed determined to oppose his landing. He chose to head for the opposite side of the bay instead. As the Endeavour passed the south head of the bay, four small canoes paddled past, each navigated by a single man spearing for fish. Like the men Cook and his crew had encountered further down the coast, these fishermen pointedly ignored the new arrivals.
DR SHAYNE WILLIAMS
They believed that the Aboriginal people weren’t actually looking at them but we do have ways of looking at people without looking at them directly. So, they were being watched when they came in.
Anchoring opposite a small village, an old woman bereft of clothing accompanied by three children stepped out of the forest. Watching them through his telescope, Banks saw that they looked at the ship but didn’t appear at all concerned about its presence. Reassured that the people here seemed to be, at worst, disinterested in their arrival, Cook decided to try again. But the lukewarm welcome quickly heated up. Two men confronted the new arrivals, brandishing woomera and spears. They made their feelings fairly clear, screaming out in a ‘harsh sounding language’. Most disturbingly, Tupaia understood not a single word the Aboriginal men were saying. Whatever advantages Tupaia had given Cook in Polynesia would amount to nothing in this new land.
SIR JOSEPH BANKS (1743–1820), 1st Baronet, Naturalist and Botanist on Cook’s first voyage
[They were] shaking their lances and menacing, in all appearance resolved to dispute our landing . . . 2 more muskets with small shot were then fired at them on which the eldest threw one more lance and then ran away as did the other.
After absorbing a volley of small shot, the two warriors ran into the bush
and were deemed ‘rank cowards’ by Banks.
Cook resorted to the sure-fire icebreaker that had served him so well at other anchorages in the Pacific – surely some little knick-knacks would capture the locals’ interest? He scattered an offering of sorts around the campsite. Pieces of cloth. Looking glasses. Beads. Combs. Nails.
Imagine Cook’s surprise when that peace offering was rejected. This was totally unexpected. The Aboriginal people of Botany Bay weren’t following the rules. Their refusal to cooperate must have been confusing and frustrating to Cook; his journal entries certainly suggest he was, at the very least, disappointed by his failure to establish a line of communication with the locals.
CAPTAIN JAMES COOK
We could know but very little of [their] customs as we never were able to form any connections with them.
Australia was refusing to give Cook anything. Everything he saw was unfamiliar and unsettling. And when the politicians and lawmakers back in Old Blighty found out how thoroughly Cook and his men had been flummoxed by this continent and its inhabitants, it played right into their hands. As they were mapping out their plans for their island prison, the powers-that-be would have been quite happy for word to spread about Australia’s perceived shortcomings. Nothing was more effective than the threat of banishment to a bleak and brutal continent on the other side of the world to strike mortal fear into the hearts of would-be criminals and encourage them to keep on the straight and narrow.
The continent would continue to baffle Cook and his men with a parade of unfamiliar and remarkable flora and fauna. Later in the voyage, when they asked an Indigenous man the name of a pouched creature they saw bounding through the bush, they were told it was a gunguuru . . . which Cook’s naturalists recorded as ‘kangaroo’.
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