That’s why Scott Morrison couldn’t get it right in the PR somehow imagining that Cook really did circumnavigate Australia. But Cook is someone the culture warriors default to, as the First Fleet arrival becomes increasingly hard to sell as a moment of enlightenment. Not the Odyssey, nor the Mayflower, nor the legendary voyage of Kupe to found Aotearoa. The Australian stopover? Came, saw, went. The three voyages themselves, taken together, are a pretty stunning human achievement whatever unpleasantness there was along the way. I suspect it’s because there’s nothing much to Cook’s encounter with Australia. Something about Cook invites kitschification, from the worst line of our national anthem - “when gallant Cook from Albion sail’d” (yes, it’s worse than “girt”, it just is) - to Cook’s cottage in Melbourne’s Fitzroy Gardens, to cold-warrior poet James McAuley’s epic Captain Quiros (a fusion of the Cook myth with earlier explorers which is so boring it should be put on the Ramsay Centre syllabus). So, in a way, it’s appropriate that he should be remembered in a PR stunt that capsized right off the slipway - a recreation of an event that never happened, a PM who doesn’t know the history he’s spruiking. Making the encounter with eastern Australia the culminating point of Cook’s decade of exploration was a way of implying Anglo predestination. Suddenly it became clear that high school history in which Cook was the “discoverer” of Australia was a piece of national narcissism.
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