Captain Cook and the Black Children

If Martians had landed on the front beach of my home town in the middle of my childhood, a small boy and his dog (Larry) would have been straight down to see what they were doing. Also present would have been Mr Porter the policeman, Councillor Golightly the mayor, and possibly Eddie George, the proprietor of Eddie’s Store, to measure them up for winter jumpers or summer bathers. It would have been a welcome of curiosity, authority and commerce. It wasn’t like that in Botany Bay in 1770.

The landing point of the Endeavour in Botany Bay has become the launching point for Australiaphobia, and the use of the word discovery a stimulus for Elmer Gantry piety. Stan Grant miserabilising on a memorial statue of Cook is pitch perfect, even as he forgets that his forebears were both on the shore and on the ship:

My ancestors were here when Cook dropped anchor. We know now that the first peoples of this continent had been here for at least 65,000 years, for us the beginning of human time. Yet this statue speaks to emptiness, it speaks to our invisibility; it says that nothing truly mattered, nothing truly counted until a white sailor first walked on these shores.

Last year I was in France and discovered Bordeaux—both in the bottle and on the banks of the Garonne. I don’t mean that Bordeaux the place was either unowned or unpeopled, and when the first claim of discovery was made by young Sydney Parkinson not a single member of the crew had stepped into the Australian landscape or noticed the presence or absence of local Aborigines. In April 1770 the Endeavour was sailing westwards after leaving New Zealand and Parkinson was writing his journal: “We continued our course, but nothing worthy of note occurred till the 19th, in the morning, and then we discovered the land of New Holland, extending a great way to the south, and to the eastward.” The influence of the discovery denialists is strong. Ask Microsoft Bing if Cook discovered Australia and the AI response is sure and wrong: “No, the idea that Captain Cook discovered Australia has long been debunked.”

As the Endeavour entered Botany Bay figures were seen near a fire. Noticing the ship, they moved to a hill offering a better view. A boat was lowered to sound the waters the Endeavour was entering and this was followed in its course by natives on the shore. No one on the beach waved: several armed men made threatening motions. Near the bay entrance were four canoes whose occupants were fishing and took no notice of the ship. Were Aborigines accustomed to looking out to sea, or were they more concerned to keep a watch inland from where danger could arise? It is a question which recurs as Cook sailed along the east coast, sometimes remarking on the lack of interest in his very interesting Endeavour. Banks wondered if these men were deafened by the sounds of the surf and had not noticed them. Perhaps they were hungry and fish were present.

At one point the canoes returned to the shore and the catch was immediately prepared for eating, everyone seemingly unconcerned with the presence of the Endeavour about half a mile distant.

Cook attempted to make contact but was rebuffed. Parkinson wrote that the locals called out something sounding like “Warra warra wai” and threw spears and stones. It was not very welcoming. For a long time we all thought those strange words meant “Go away” but now modern attempts to recreate the language spoken by the people on the shore claim the words mean “You’re all dead” and suggest the people believed they were seeing spirits on the big canoe. At an earlier time, before moderns invented “oral history”, Aboriginal testimony suggested the men climbing the ship’s rigging were thought to have been giant possums.

The new translation is interesting but, like so much of our reinvented race history, is uncertain because those same words were heard in other early contacts around Australia where very different languages were spoken. The historian Keith Vincent Smith has noted that “Warra wai” was recorded at times of first contact in Botany Bay in 1770, in both Botany Bay and Sydney Cove in 1788, Oyster Bay in Tasmania in 1791, and in Western Australia at the Swan River in 1829. Smith also cites a family letter by Daniel Southwell, written at Sydney Cove in 1788, which gives a different impression of the usage: “The ships saluted at sunrise, noon and sunset, which must have frightened the warra warras, for so we call the blacks, from their constant cry of ‘warra’ at everything they see that is new.”

When the Endeavour moored in Botany Bay, Cook asked for help, in a search for water, and was refused—violently. This is Joseph Banks’s account of what took place (spellings have been modernised):

After dinner the boats were manned and we set out from the ship intending to land at the place where we saw these people [a group watching from the shore], hoping that as they regarded the ship’s coming in to the bay so little they would as little regard our landing. We were in this however mistaken, for as soon as we approached the rocks two of the men came down upon them, each armed with a lance of about 10 feet long and a short stick which he seemed to handle as if it was a machine to throw the lance. They called to us very loud in a harsh sounding Language of which neither us or Tupia [the Tahitian travelling with Cook] understood a word, shaking their lances and menacing, in all appearance resolved to dispute our landing to the utmost though they were but two and we 30 or 40 at least. In this manner we parleyed with them for about a quarter of an hour, they waving to us to be gone, we again signing that we wanted water and that we meant them no harm. They remained resolute so a musket was fired over them, the Effect of which was that the Youngest of the two dropped a bundle of lances on the rock at the instant in which he heard the report; he however snatched them up again and both renewed their threats and opposition. A Musket loaded with small shot was now fired at the Eldest of the two who was about 40 yards from the boat; it struck him on the legs but he minded it very little so another was immediately fired at him; on this he ran up to the house about 100 yards distant and soon returned with a shield. In the mean time we had landed on the rock. He immediately threw a lance at us and the young man another which fell among the thickest of us but hurt nobody; 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.

What had occurred at this moment when the British met the locals?

Theresa Ardler, an activist who wants to “change the story”, offered her history on the ABC:

I was in high school in Year 10 studying Cook, and we were reading a book that said the bullets were fired over their heads. I remember getting up in my class and saying, “This is wrong, this is not the true history”, because my grandfather was shot. I said everyone needs to rip that page out of your book.

Stan Grant used the politics of Mabo and “frontier history” to turn what happened into what should have happened at Botany Bay: “These were sovereign people defending their country from an invader.”

The National Museum of Australia is brisk:

Attempts to communicate failed, so Cook’s party forced a landing under gunfire. After one of the men was shot and injured, the Gweagal retreated. Cook and his men then entered their camp. They took artefacts and left trinkets in exchange. Seven days later, after little further interaction with Gweagal people, the Endeavour’s crew sailed away.

Neither Ardler, Grant nor the Museum mention the children. Banks’s account—and the journals of Cook and Parkinson are similar—continues just after the two warriors have run off:

We went up to the houses, in one of which we found the children hid behind the shield and a piece of bark in one of the houses. We were conscious from the distance the people had been from us when we fired that the shot could have done them no material harm; we therefore resolved to leave the children on the spot without even opening their shelter. We therefore threw into the house to them some beads, ribbands, cloths etc. as presents and went away. We however thought it no improper measure to take away with us all the lances which we could find about the houses, amounting in number to forty or fifty.

What sort of parents abandon their children like this? The camp kids, surely used to wandering freely about, have been placed in a house—Parkinson’s sketch shows a rough shelter of branches. Have they been deserted or forgotten by their fearful and careless parents? Surely their placement and confinement are deliberate. They, and the shield and the spears, may have been left as an offering to the spirits. Hungry white ghosts, who had not been frightened away, have been provided food, and weapons for hunting. Ray Ingrey, a representative of modern Botany Bay Aborigines, endorses the supposition that his forebears believed they were dealing with beings returned from the dead: “So when the two men opposed the landing, they were protecting the country in a spiritual way, from ghosts.”

From an Aboriginal perspective the children were not “found” by Cook and Banks, they were “given” by the Aborigines to famished spirits. In late autumn everyone may have been hungry.

Modern activists might be more accepting of Cook if he had recognised Aboriginal customs by eating the children. To do so would have been a form of communion between the English navigator and the Botany Bay locals. It would have made a fine drawing for Sydney Parkinson and a fine anthropological paragraph in Banks’s journal. The modern oral history would be marvellous and, for historians, a superb balance with Cook’s own fate.

In Botany Bay the Endeavour met violence and irresponsibility. Cook behaved cautiously. Firing on the two threatening men was a reasonable response. It was not vicious or bloodthirsty and it would not have happened if the people on the shore had approached the strangers with caution and friendliness. The Aborigines showed they were culturally incapable of dealing with outsiders without invoking their own rules of violence. There was no authority for Cook to deal with. Interest was certainly present on the Aboriginal side but it never led to an organised response or even individuals, including curious boys (with or without dogs), to approach the crew with human warmth, and the fault lay with the locals. Joseph Banks, after a week of non-involvement by the Aborigines, offered a searing opinion of their behaviour: “4 May 1770—Myself in the woods botanizing as usual, now quite void of fear as our neighbours have turned out such rank cowards.”

If we are to see the past from both perspectives, as so many of us wish, then the original brutality of Aboriginal life has to be investigated and brought into our history writing. An inclusive ship-and-shore history needs truth, not invented oral histories, which should be named and removed.

Modern accounts which politely and politically ignore Aboriginal brutality are self-indulgent, politically motivated and utterly boring. The Sydney Gazette began publication on March 5, 1803, and on Christmas Day that year published this story—it may be the first time you have read it:

A circumstance that lately took place at Milkmaid Reach, on the Coast between Sydney and Hawkesbury, among a body of Natives, stands, in point of deliberate inhumanity towards a fellow creature, unparalleled save only in the barbarous usages to which these people are habituated. One of their number had climbed a lofty tree in pursuit of a Cockatoo; and as soon as he gained the summit and had secured the bird, unfortunately got entangled in the twigs, and in trying to disentangle himself, lost his hold, and by a tremendous fall had both a leg and thigh broke. The women at the instant set up a piercing shriek, and the men assembled around him. The elders examined the fractures minutely, and pronouncing them incurable, hastily commanded the females to retire; then erecting a pile of brush-wood about the body, actually set it on fire, whilst the unhappy creature was alive. As soon as this inhuman but effectual remedy was administered, the Boatmen who were spectators of the proceedings, were advised by one of the more friendly natives to get off as quickly as possible, as the fatal event had aroused the indignation of the whole tribe against all white people, as the Cockatoo would not have been climbed for, had not a reward been the known consequence of its capture.

If today my Martians landed in suburban Sydney or Melbourne they would be met by foreskin inspectors disguised as anti-Zionists, climate protesters, Islamic clerics, Middle Eastern and African gangs, and Pascoeites selling smoke ceremonies. This welcoming committee would represent our intellectual elite, the authorities on our streets, and commercial interests. This time it may be the visitors who say “Warra warra wai”.