5 Cook, and his place in the Australian imagination
5 Cook, and his place in the Australian imagination
James Cook’s name and image are familiar to most Australians. He is present in the title of this work, and in the name of the institution that supports it. Yet despite the prominence given to Cook in Australia, he visited the continent only briefly. He returned to Aotearoa (New Zealand) more often than to Australia, and he spent much more time there. Cook is remembered in Aotearoa, but is not considered the island group’s European discoverer, and his legacy is debated in historical terms. In Australia, Cook’s cultural significance is different for different groups of Australians: to some he is a founding hero, to others he marks the start of an invasion. Both interpretations have spread well beyond the limits of his actual presence on the continent and highlight the way in which his imaginative presence on the Australian continent is far greater than his physical presence ever was.
Cook’s encounter with the Australian continent during his lifetime was limited. He travelled north along the east coast of the continent in 1770, and named the coastline he mapped New South Wales. He was the first European to record the eastern edge of the Australian continent, and the western region retained the name New Holland until after the voyages of Matthew Flinders. Cook’s ship the Endeavour collided with what is now known as the Great Barrier Reef (a name later suggested by Flinders) and Cook and his crew spent seven weeks repairing his ship in what is now the far north of the state of Queensland. Cook recognised his good fortune in being able to repair his ship, make his way through the rest of the reef, and escape Australian shores. He returned briefly to what is now considered Australia when he visited the island now called Tasmania on his third voyage to the Pacific. By 1786, when the British government made the decision to establish a penal colony on the coast mapped by Cook, Cook was already dead. He had been killed in Hawai’i in 1779 and as a result was unable to offer advice to the British government on its plans for colonising New South Wales.
Despite Cook’s limited contact with Australia, the continent is home to many memorials to him. Some of those memorials are of questionable authenticity, such as Captain Cook’s cottage in Fitzroy Gardens, Melbourne. The cottage was painstakingly transported from the United Kingdom in 1934, and reassembled with attention to authenticity that extended to the plants climbing its walls. However, Cook never lived in the cottage (he may have visited his parents when they lived there), and he never visited the region that is now Victoria. Other Australian Cook monuments are large and startling, such as the privately-owned, 8m-tall, fibreglass Captain Cook that graced the streets of Cairns between 1972 and 2022. Canada, Aotearoa, Britain, and the United States of America (particularly the state of Hawai’i) are also home to Cook memorials, but those memorials tend to be