Not a discovery voyage

“We pay our respects and dedicate the Unsettled exhibition to the people and other Beings who keep the law of this land; to the Elders and Traditional Owners of all the knowledges, places, and stories in this exhibition; and to the Ancestors and Old People for their resilience and guidance.

We advise that there are some confronting topics addressed in this exhibition, including massacres and genocide. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples should be advised that there may be images of people who have passed away.”

Laura McBride and Dr Mariko Smith, 2021.

The HMB Endeavour’s voyage was originally commissioned as a scientific mission. The Royal Society in London had tasked Lieutenant James Cook with leading an expedition to the Pacific to observe the 1769 Transit of Venus in Tahiti. It was hoped that by observing the planet Venus moving across the Sun, observers could determine the distance from the Earth to the Sun.

When the British Admiralty (Royal Navy) found out where Cook was going, they took advantage of the opportunity to expand the British Empire’s interests in the Pacific. In light of the fierce competition between the imperial powers of Europe for global dominance, they issued Cook with sealed secret orders instructing him to take possession of any unoccupied lands.

Listen to an excerpt from the secret instructions for Lieutenant Cook, as read by actor Charles Mayer

Cook was permitted to formally unseal his secret instructions from the Admiralty once the Transit of Venus had been observed in 1769. He would then take the HMB Endeavour through the islands of the Pacific towards Aotearoa (New Zealand) and then westward across the Tasman Sea.

It was not unusual in this period to be given an additional set of official orders like this; agents of the Crown were often instructed to make preliminary claims of territorial possession should an opportunity present itself. However, Cook failed to follow these instructions to the letter, since he was told to gain the consent of the ‘Natives’ when making his claim of possession, and as detailed in the Unsettled exhibition’s Recognising Invasions section he did not obtain permission from any Aboriginal people. Australia’s East Coast was already inhabited by sovereign First Nations Peoples, as evident by the lighting of Signal Fires along the vast eastern coastline. It is upon this duplicity that Australia claims its foundations, with the convenient narrative that Aboriginal peoples were supposedly too cowardly and passive to resist. ^[3] Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples dispute this colonial representation of them.

Many Australians think that Lieutenant Cook was the first European to discover Australia,^[5] but these lands have known many people before his “discovery”. First Nations peoples have been here for hundreds of generations. Clans and Nations in northern Australia and the Torres Strait engaged in international trade and marriage. This map shows that other earlier European voyages took place on northern, southern and western coastlines before Cook and the HMB Endeavour.

Cook’s charting of the east coast of Australia and his claim of possession in 1770 have, particularly from the late 1800s, become an essential part of the colonial narrative of the foundation of Australia as it shows a physical act of possession.^[6] Debunking this foundational myth has been at the heart of social and political movements leading to Land Rights and Native Title.

Cook himself never claimed that he was the first European to discover Australia. In his journal entry for 22 August 1770, he acknowledged the name of “New Holland” and how “…on the western side I can make no new discovery, the honour of which belongs to Dutch Navigators.” ^[7]

Presented as a commemorative plate responding to the 250th anniversary of Cook’s East Coast voyage and act of possession, the skull and crossbones motif against an image of a European ship speaks to the symbolism of what this event represents to many First Nations peoples. When viewed through this lens, Cook’s actions could be seen as an act of piracy, with warnings of danger and death. It directly questions romanticised tellings of Australian history, particularly around Australia’s foundation as being built by Europeans taming the land which also omit the presence of First Nations peoples. Read an article about Piracy here.