Captain Cook's legacy is complex, but whether white Australia likes it or not he is emblematic of violence and oppression | Paul Daley

British and Australian regret over Cook’s treatment of Indigenous people would go a long way to enhancing understanding of the continent’s shared history

The British government has issued an oh-so-carefully worded expression of “regret” for the killing of Māori in Aotearoa, today’s New Zealand, at the point of first contact during Lieutenant James Cook’s “voyage of discovery” 250 years ago.

Regrets! The old empire certainly has had cause for a few when it comes to the violence it has meted out to the indigenes of the places it took during Britain’s colonial expansion.

For the deaths of a million Irish in the potato famine. For the Kenyans tortured and imprisoned during the Mau Mau insurgency. For the Indians killed in the Amritsar massacre. And, now, for the Māori, whose first contact with Cook’s HMS Bark Endeavour in 1769 was characterised by disastrous violence for the first Aotearoans.

After Endeavour anchored near the eastern bank of the Tūranganui River close to New Zealand’s present-day Gisborne, Te Maro, a senior man of the Ngāti Oneone group, was promptly shot and killed while leading a ceremonial challenge to the British sailors. At least eight more Māori were killed over the next few days in what British history has largely cast, based on the diaries of Cook and others on the Endeavour, as a misunderstanding.

As New Zealand counts down to next week’s 250th anniversary of Cook’s arrival there, Britain’s high commissioner in the country, Laura Clarke, made a “statement of regret” about the violent first contact.

“Here on behalf of the four countries of the United Kingdom, on behalf of the people of those four countries … I acknowledge the pain of those first encounters,” she said.

The violence Clarke referred to was stemmed by Tupaia, a Tahitian priest and experienced seaman who joined the Endeavour in the Society Islands and helped Cook and his crew navigate to New Zealand and onwards to the east coast of Australia.

The remarkable story of Tupaia, his skills as a navigator and his fractious relationship with Cook and his crew, has been lost in the non-Indigenous commemorative frenzy, in Australia at least, about Endeavour’s arrival and its supposed critical role in national birth at a time when this continent was already replete with hundreds of nations reaching back tens of thousands of years.

He is celebrated in Tahiti and New Zealand. But here in Australia Tupaia has largely fallen through the cracks of a national non-Indigenous narrative that places Cook’s arrival at the centre of modern Australian birth that ignores the sensibilities of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. It’s a trope that has long trivialised the violence that unfolded after Endeavour’s arrival at Kamay (Botany Bay) on 29 April 1770 – conflict that was, unfortunately, prescient for all that would eventually follow Cook’s colonial claim.

New Zealand has been far more engaged with Māori sentiment towards Cook and how his anniversary might be marked than Australia is with Indigenous views about how to commemorate the great pathfinder and cartographer’s arrival here. This shouldn’t surprise. For Māori culture has long been central to New Zealand’s mainstream identity and politics, especially compared with Australia where for generations governments and cultural institutions have largely relegated 60,000-plus years of continuous Aboriginal civilisation to the margins of history – to something unconnected “over there” that happened before “settlement” and the oppressive white Australian federation.

New Zealand’s ministry for culture and heritage, which is organising a replica Endeavour circumnavigation of the country, has, for example, instructed the ship only to stop at ports “where a welcome is clear” from Māori communities.

Will we ever see a day in Australia where the government is similarly alive to Indigenous sentiment and sensibility about the way history and national foundation is celebrated? While we close our eyes and think of Australia Day, we will see soon enough. For just as Aboriginal groups protested en masse against the 200th Cook celebrations in 1970, and the 1988 bicentenary of invasion, Indigenous people will hit the streets and ports again on the lieutenant’s 250th.

There will be calls for the replica Endeavour which will circumnavigate Australia (Cook never did this in his own bark) as part of the commemorations here, to be banned from some ports. The response of a government led by Scott Morrison – the member for Cook and a great booster of the lieutenant who will spend $50m in his honour, stripped from the ABC budget, next year – will be instructive.

Until very recently commemorations at present-day Kurnell in southern Sydney, where Cook first set foot on the east coast, involved a recreation of the landing – replete with the moment his crew shot two Gweagal men. The spears and shield of those men remain in the British Museum, with the continued requests of their Gweagal family for their return treated with cold English condescension, even, the descendants would say, contempt.

The campaign to bring home the Gweagal shield and spears

There were more violent encounters as Cook sailed up the east coast – including at Endeavour River (Wabalumbaal) – renaming, in the Queen’s English, Indigenous places as he progressed.

Cook’s legacy, like the man, is complex. But whether white Australia likes it or not, in this country’s Indigenous consciousness he remains largely emblematic of the colonial and postcolonial violence and oppression that came after Arthur Phillip’s invasion 18 years later. The doorman to invasion.

Which is why a little British and Australian regret over Cook’s treatment of the Aboriginal people would go a long way to enhancing understanding of the continent’s more recent shared history, as difficult and freighted with injustice and oppression as it is. Not least, that would be a small step on the road to the full-scale apology and reparations, well overdue, that both countries owe Indigenous Australians for all that British colonialism dealt them.

  • Paul Daley is a Guardian Australia columnist

Contributor

Paul Daley

The GuardianTramp

Related Content

Article image
Captain Cook's cottage – the place he didn't ever call home | Paul Daley
We’re about to be subjected to the frenzy commemorating the 250th anniversary of Cook’s arrival. We should get a few facts right first

Paul Daley

01, Mar, 2020 @4:30 PM

Article image
When commemorating Captain Cook, we should remember the advice he ignored | Paul Daley
250 years ago, James Cook was told only to take possession of the land with the consent of Indigenous peoples

Paul Daley

23, Jul, 2018 @1:51 AM

Article image
How do we settle the 'statue wars'? Let's start by telling the truth about our past | Paul Daley
Colonial-era statues don’t of themselves teach us anything. But they can be portals to inquiry that lead to honest history

Paul Daley

28, Jun, 2018 @6:00 PM

Article image
The story of Yagan’s head is a shameful reminder of colonialism’s legacy | Paul Daley
On the day Princess Diana died 20 years ago, Noongar elders finally had returned to them the head of Yagan, their equivalent of a warrior-prince

Paul Daley

31, Aug, 2017 @1:17 AM

Article image
The legacy reverberates: how a repulsive image reminds us of our ugly past | Paul Daley
Photographs of Indigenous men and boys in chains give testament to a system of brutal slavery in the early 1900s. They are yet another symbol of continued oppression

Paul Daley

19, Jun, 2017 @2:22 AM

Article image
Etched in Bone – chronicling Australia's shameful trade in Indigenous remains | Paul Daley
A sensitive documentary shows the theft and eventual return of human bones to Arnhem Land

Paul Daley

02, Oct, 2018 @6:00 PM

Article image
There are lots of ways to say sorry, but Indigenous Australians need a treaty now | Paul Daley
Sorry Day is an important if not yet sufficient moment of symbolism. Australia has a lot more to do to. And that means a treaty first, recognition second

Paul Daley

25, May, 2016 @8:30 PM

Article image
So many Australian place names honour murderous white men and their violent acts
Long before the Dutch or British came, the land resounded with stories that charted the sky, the beasts and all the humans

Paul Daley

16, Mar, 2018 @9:00 PM

Article image
It is high time Bathurst council respected traditional owners' wishes and found another site for a go-kart track | Paul Daley
The imposition of the track on a sacred women’s site would be in contempt of local Indigenous sensibility, culture and millennia of Aboriginal history

Paul Daley

08, Mar, 2021 @2:23 AM

Article image
Indigenous songlines: a beautiful way to think about the confluence of story and time | Paul Daley
The theme of Naidoc week is songlines. For the uninitiated – and that is most non-Indigenous Australians – songlines challenge the way we think about history

Paul Daley

04, Jul, 2016 @1:53 AM