The Pacific

by Meaghan Wilson Anastasios

  Aboriginal culture sings and performs to the land, deepening the ties of a mutual relationship – just as all those re-enactments of the landing at Botany Bay were a way of asserting the British claim to the land. Though the latter was a rather pathetic attempt by comparison.

  WARWICK THORNTON

  There are many beautiful human beings out there who are really interested in a different version of Australia’s history and they’re getting it through art, literature, and film. That’s where it’s all coming from – the different point of view . . . the first voice. So it’s a very exciting time.

  To many contemporary Aboriginal Australians, Cook symbolises the end of Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination. Artists including Daniel Boyd, Jason Wing, Christian Thompson, Gordon Bennett, H.J. Wedge, Vincent Namatjira and Paddy Wainburranga have drawn on the Cook story to present an Indigenous perspective on invasion, colonisation and dispossession.

  WARWICK THORNTON

  Is Cook friend or foe? I think he was a pawn. He was tasked to claim Australia, which he did. But the foundation of the nation? That falls on Britain – the empire that was built on the back of other cultures . . . other peoples. They obliterated a shitload of culture. But a shitload of culture still remains, and we’re celebrating it. And it seems like the rest of Australia has started celebrating it too.

  ERNIE DINGO

  James Cook? He don’t mean nothing to me other than the fact that he was a so-called bloke who discovered something that wasn’t lost.

  But throughout much of Australia, Cook still has a larger-than-life status.

  WARWICK THORNTON

  Do I blame Cook? I think we all do. But is it fair? Well, if you need to point the finger, he’s the guy. But it’s those who came after him that were the real bad guys. Cook is like the footy coach who cops the blame for the team performance. We know that. But he’s become a useful metaphor. Art is also a way to deconstruct the myth of Cook and grapple with the potency of his story to reframe and reinterpret the first encounter.

  Looming over the northern Queensland city of Cairns is a reminder of just how enormous – and disconcerting – the myth of Cook can be.

  Yes, to go with all the big animals and produce, Australia has a Big Captain Cook. A very big Cook who appears as if he’s giving a Nazi salute. The intention of the statue’s creators, though, was to render an oil painting on a monumental scale – in this case, as depicted by Emanuel Phillips Fox in Landing of Captain Cook at Botany Bay.

  Even if we put aside the goose-stepping Cook in far north Queensland, the Cook we think of in Australia today bears little resemblance to the man who came ashore in Botany Bay. He has come to represent so many different things.

  JOHN ROBSON, Map Librarian, University of Waikato

  I think he was a great man and had many admirable qualities. He wasn’t perfect but he was placed upon a pedestal in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially in New Zealand and Australia – both countries that were looking for a hero. I think he himself would have hated to have been in that position . . .. A lot of the negativity that surrounds him now is not so much about him, himself, but more to do with what Europeans brought to the Pacific and the indigenous people of the Pacific afterwards.

  The person you see when you look at Cook is not just an eighteenth-century navigator who was the first man to chart the east coast of the continent. He is also a reflection of who you are: your personal history, your perceptions and your prejudices. For all Australians – Indigenous and non-indigenous alike – Cook is a whole lot more than the sum of his parts.

  WARWICK THORNTON

  I’m looking forward to Australia’s future. We can only get better, because we’ve been pretty terrible for quite a while.

  James Cook, the man, is long gone. What Australia is left to grapple with is Captain Cook, the myth.

  ERNIE DINGO

  I like to think about history ‘BC’ – Before Cook.

  NINE

  DANGEROUS SHORES

  You can’t reverse things. You can’t put things into reverse. It is a new Pacific and we make what we can of it and make the best we can of it. And you see glimmers of really wonderful things happening all over the place.

  SAM NEILL

  There are days you should just stay in bed. You’re out of milk. Your bar of soap is the size of a water cracker. The seam that’s been threatening to pop on your pants finally gives up the ghost. You catch every red light. The lid of your takeaway cup is askew and after one sip your lap is swimming in hot coffee. Mid-text, you drop your mobile phone and it ends up in the inaccessible crack between the driver’s seat and the chassis. OK, you shouldn’t have been texting while you were driving – not the point. Some days it seems like the world’s got it in for you.

  For James Cook, Australia was that day. As he departed Botany Bay on 6 May 1770 without making the local connections he had so desperately wanted to establish, he could only hope things would be easier as the Endeavour headed north. The ship was low on supplies – and given it had been a year and a half since they’d left Plymouth, that was a fairly frequent state of affairs. Replenishing stores was never straightforward, but Cook was a persistent man: up until his arrival in Australia, he had been able to negotiate with the locals to get what he needed.

  JOHN ELLIOTT (1759–1844), Midshipman, Cook’s second voyage

  No man could be better calculated to gain the confidence of savages than Capn Cook. He was brave, uncommonly cool, humane – and patient. He would land alone unarmed, or lay aside his arms, and sit down, when they threatened with theirs, throwing them beads, knives, and other little presents, then by degrees advancing nearer, till by patience, and forbearance, he gained their friendship.

  The one thing we can be fairly certain of is that even in the face of adversity James Cook refused to turn his back on a challenge. Accounts written by crew members on all of his three Pacific voyages spill over with evidence of Cook’s resolve and unstinting praise for his character.

  JAMES TREVENEN (1760–1790), Midshipman, Cook’s third voyage

  This indefatigability was a leading feature of his character. If he failed in, or could no longer pursue, his first great object, he immediately began to consider how he might be more useful in prosecuting some inferior one. Procrastination and irresolution he was a stranger to. Action was life to him & repose a sort of death.

  But, still. Charting the east coast of the continent of New Holland was not in his brief. It wouldn’t have been at all unreasonable for him to break out into the open ocean and head straight to the safe harbour of Batavia. Once he had committed to a course of action, though, he saw it through.

  Before he left England the Admiralty and Royal Society had set Cook a series of tasks to be undertaken on the South Seas expedition. He had ticked them all off the list. So what was motivating him as he fought the winds and currents while he traced his way north, charting as he went? Was he just having a stab at empire building and laying claim to yet another distant land for the British Crown? Or was Cook inspired by something more? Perhaps this was symptomatic of his ambition and hunger – the steely resolve of a lowborn country boy determined to make a mark. Australia wasn’t going to make it easy for him, though. This land had a few nasty surprises in store for him.

  When Cook sailed the Endeavour past the island of K’gari (later named ‘Fraser Island’ by the British) on 20 May, its Badtjala inhabitants knew he was headed for trouble. A stunningly beautiful place encircled by powdery white beaches and swathed in rolling sand dunes and towering rainforest, at 120 kilometres in length and about twenty-five kilometres wide K’gari is the largest sand island in the world. It’s also a botanical peculiarity because it’s the only place on earth where sand sustains a large rainforest canopy. To the Badtjala people it is – quite literally – paradise.

  GEMMA CRONIN, Badtjala Nation, Linguist and Performer

  There’s absolutely everything here. There’s an abundance of food and water . .
. shelter. It’s a paradise.

  The Indigenous name for the island is taken from the Badtjala creation story. The goddess K’gari was tasked with finding her way down to earth to make the mountains, rivers and sea. Having fallen in love with her creation, K’gari didn’t want to leave, and so the messenger god, Yendingie, transformed her into a heavenly island.

  As they enjoyed another day in paradise, the Badtjala were surprised to see Cook’s ship appear on the horizon.

  GEMMA CRONIN

  They saw the ship about seventy-five miles from here, down on Hook Point on the bottom end of the island. And they started walking because it was tacking, to and fro, off the beach. They followed it for a whole day but they weren’t really sure what it was.

  As the ship sailed past the island’s eastern shore, the Badtjala tracked it, following it along the beach. They scrambled to the best vantage point on the island to get a better look – the headland they called Dhokki Wurru.

  GEMMA CRONIN

  The people got worried for the boat and ran up onto the headland to try and warn him about the shoal out there. They were trying to tell him to go back, but in his journal he thinks we were waving at him.

  Cook saw the assembled Badtjala people watching the ship, and so fell back on the ubiquitous, catch-all term for anyone other than a European and called it ‘Indian Head’.

  Today, Indian Head is one of Fraser Island’s most popular tourist destinations. Making the most of the same stunning vantage point used by the Badtjala to watch Cook sail on by, visitors to the island take selfies overlooking the crystalline tropical waters below. But these days, Badtjala people stay away from the lookout point. It evokes too many grim memories.

  GEMMA CRONIN

  They brought the black trackers, the native police up here, and . . . drove my people off this headland. All the women and children and old people that were hiding behind Indian Head . . . they drove them up with horses and shot them. So this is a major massacre site, for Badtjala people. Women and children and old people killed – the ones who were supposed to be protected.

  This massacre occurred during the settler wars, as European arrivals began to exploit the island’s sand and timber resources. It was just one of many tragic events in the sad history of British colonisation that played out across the continent.

  SAM NEILL

  Another unseemly chapter of Australian history is the many, many massacres of Aboriginal people that took place here. There are terrible things that happened all over the Pacific in the wake of Cook’s voyages. I’ve had to face up to this on my journey.

  Since 1770 and in keeping with oral tradition, the Badtjala people have preserved a record of Cook’s swift passage past the island. A song, still performed by Badtjala dancers today, recounts the Endeavour’s arrival and the local response to its appearance.

  Strangers are travelling with a cloud, Areeram!!

  It has fire, inside must be a bad water spirit.

  It’s stupid maybe? It’s going directly to that rainbow serpent place,

  This is the truth that I bring

  It is breathing smoke rhythmically from its rear, must be song men and sorcerers

  Coming up and going back with the wind at its rear, like a sand crab

  The sea carries this ship here, why?

  Gabrin wuna’la yaneen, Areeram

  Ngun’gu’ni wiinj gung’milung

  Nyundal wun’yamba dhali dhak’kin’bah, Gebeer barine

  Moomoo gumbir’l’im bundi burree, Yauwa dhan man’ngur

  Yuang yangu moomoo gumbir, Billi’ngunda

  Tin’gera dan’da gung’mungalum minya?

  Clearly the locals saw it as an event worth commemorating.

  GEMMA CRONIN

  Most indigenous people have that painful past no matter where they come from in the world. It was that change for us as a people, and that’s what that song’s about – a foretelling of what was coming, and our old people were intuitive enough to realise something like that in the last line . . . ‘the sea brings this ship here – why?’ They knew something big was coming.

  In the early 1900s a phonograph recording was made of the song. In 1923, an Irishman who was admitted to the island’s Wide Bay clan, Edward Fitzgerald Armitage, translated and published two Badtjala songs; the one that describes Cook’s arrival, and another that relates to Matthew Flinders’ visit to Fraser Island in 1802. Armitage’s translations were published in 1944.

  *

  In May 1770, if Cook had known what the Badtjala had to say about where he planned to travel next, the final chapter of his voyage up the eastern coastline might have had a happier ending for him and his crew. They knew Cook was navigating his ship towards a dangerous shoal known as Thoorvoor, later named Breaksea Spit. It was a precursor to the 2300 kilometre–long labyrinth of coral reefs that make up the Great Barrier Reef.

  As he navigated past Fraser Island, Cook had sailed over 1200 kilometres since leaving Botany Bay and had yet to find a suitable place to make landfall. Restocking his ship’s dwindling supplies was a high priority as the dreaded scurvy began to raise its rancid head on board. But he was also still determined to become the first man to chart this coastline. What he didn’t – and couldn’t – know was that the entire continent had already been charted by its inhabitants; in song.

  GEMMA CRONIN

  Songlines are like a big web that sits over the whole of Australia. They all interconnect. In the old days when we walked the trails – the Dreaming trails – you’d have to sing the songs of all the land that you went past – of that tree, that rock, that lake, that creek. It’s all a picture in the land. We don’t need a map, and we don’t even need to use the stars to guide ourselves through country. They link us up, from this side of the country, to the other side of the country. Every songline runs into another songline. The practice of song is connected to the Dreamtime story. In this story, the serpent that created land started singing up people and places, when he gets to the end of the song people know where their country begins and ends. Song was also a significant part of exchange between clans. New songs were brought when women from other clans joined the tribe. Some of the songs and stories match up from places as far away as Arnhem Land and the Gold Coast – it’s a vast network of exchange and interconnected communication traversing the country.

  Australia is crisscrossed by a network of songlines, or Dreaming tracks that tell of the creation of the land by the Aboriginal ancestors. One songline crosses all the way from Port Augusta in South Australia to Arnhem Land in the far north of the country. Another runs from the coast of Western Australia to Central Australia. The songlines are shared by clans and pass from one tribe’s country to another, recording waterholes, hunting grounds and rivers. Custodians of the country have ownership of the songs and it was, and still is, their duty to pass each song on to the next generation.

  GEMMA CRONIN

  Songs are part of our bloodlines. When we teach our children we teach them first about their body parts, because each part of the body corresponds to a part of the land. Our songs tell about our fingers and hands, which are mangroves coming up out of the mud. Our body is a map for the land.

  Songlines are deeply spiritual. But they also perform a practical function. By memorising the ancestors’ journeys and the landmarks they made as they travelled, Aboriginal people commit to memory the paths that lead them safely through country.

  The first Europeans who travelled into the interior of Australia were led by Aboriginal guides who followed their songlines and showed the new arrivals the easiest and safest routes with stops at waterholes and hunting grounds. Eventually, these became stock routes, then roads. Today, as travellers take off along Australian highways armed with GPS and Google Maps, most of them are unaware that the roads they’re following are quite often songlines.

  *

  As the Endeavour sailed up the coast, Cook had no idea he was also following a songline – the migration route of the whales that cruised
along the same currents that were carrying the ship north. Not that this would have been any use to Cook if he had known. Things were going from bad to worse. A brief landing at Bustard Bay on 23 May (near what would one day be the site of the town known as 1770) yielded some water and a serve or two of fish and birds felled by some accurate marksmanship. But little was found in the way of fresh fruit and vegetables. They pushed on, and the pickings became slimmer still. Just south of present-day Mackay on 30 May, Cook was unable to find fresh water. He was getting desperate and gave the barren place a rather forlorn name – ‘Thirsty Sound’.

  The men on board were getting tetchy. When Cook’s clerk, Richard Orton, fell into bed in what can only be assumed was a state of dead drunkenness, person or persons unknown relieved him of his clothes and cropped his ears. Cook was livid, as much for the perceived insult to his authority as for poor Orton’s misfortune.

  CAPTAIN JAMES COOK

  [T]he greatest insult that could be offered to my authority in this ship, as I have always been ready to hear and redress every complaint that have been made against any person in the ship.

  Despite threats, entreaties and inducements, nobody fessed up.

  By this point, Cook must have been thinking things couldn’t possibly get any worse. But he was wrong. When he passed Fraser Island, the Badtjala people knew he was navigating into some of the deadliest waters on the planet.

  Cook and his ship had managed to escape relatively unscathed up to this point. But he was about to meet his match.