Cooking the books: how re-enactments of the Endeavour’s voyage perpetuate myths of Australia’s ‘discovery’

Kath Walker (Oodgeroo Noonuccal) with Doug Nicholls on Frenchman’s Beach, La Perouse, on April 29 1970. During the Cook bicentenary protest, activists declared a day of mourning for Aboriginal nations.
Image from the Tribune collection from the 1970 Cook Bi-centenary protest, to be featured in the State Library of NSW’s upcoming exhibition ‘Eight Days in Gamay.’

Kate Darian-Smith, University of Tasmania and Katrina Schlunke, University of Tasmania

Captain James Cook arrived in the Pacific 250 years ago, triggering British colonisation of the region. We’re asking researchers to reflect on what happened and how it shapes us today. You can see other stories in the series here and an interactive here.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised this article contains names and images of deceased people.

---

Prime Minister Scott Morrison stumbled on the word “re-enactment” when outlining his government’s (now suspended) plans for commemorating the 250th anniversary of Captain James Cook’s mythologised “discovery” of Australia.

Certainly, the planned route of the replica HMB Endeavour with 39 stops (and funded at A$6.7 million) could not be described as such: Cook never circumnavigated mainland Australia nor visited Tasmania on the Endeavour.

Morrison quickly clarified that the only gesture of historical accuracy would be a “retracing” of Cook’s voyage up the eastern seaboard.

Historical re-enactments of Cook’s landing are not new to settler Australia. They have focused on Cook’s landfall at Botany Bay, south of Sydney, where the Endeavour’s crew first stepped onto the continent on April 29 1770.

His journal recorded they were greeted by two Dharawal men “who seem’d resolved to oppose our landing”. Cook fired his musket at the men three times, including aiming directly, forcing their retreat.

Cook’s active role in British hostility to Aboriginal peoples was erased from subsequent performances of the Botany Bay landing.

These have also been embellished with Cook claiming the east coast of Australia — this actually occurred some months later at Possession Island in the Torres Strait.

Such popular “re-enactments” of national “foundation moments” have elements of fantasy, compressing time and history into palatable narratives for mainstream Australia.

The history of Cook re-enactments

Cook’s arrival was commemorated as early as 1822, when Sydney’s Philosophical Society erected a plaque at Kurnell, on the headland of Botany Bay. By 1864, the Australian Patriotic Association had located the “exact” site a kilometre away.

Following the 1870 centenary of Cook’s landfall, annual pro-British “celebrations” at Botany Bay involved the presence of the governor, flag-raising, gun salutes, and military displays.

In a society eager to erase its convict stain, Cook was a more acceptable founder than Governor Arthur Phillip, who had established the penal colony in Sydney Cove in 1788.

Considerable confusion existed then – and continues today — about the historical roles of Cook and Phillip. Even during the 1888 Centennial of the First Fleet, the largest triumphal arch in Sydney was adorned with Cook’s image and a model of the Endeavour.

The inauguration of the Commonwealth of Australia in January 1901 provided the impetus for a major re-enactment at Kurnell, headlined as the “Second Coming of Cook”. The spectacle attracted a crowd of over 5,000, with 1,000 enjoying a champagne luncheon in an enormous marquee.

Monument of Captain Cook in Kurnell, Sydney.
Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences

The re-enactment began with the arrival of the Endeavour, represented by local fishing vessel “Fanny Fisher”. Once ashore, Cook and his sailors and marines encountered 25 Aboriginal men armed with spears and decorated with feathers and ochre. A gun was fired overhead, then Cook ordered a sailor to shoot at the Aborigines before making his imperial claim on the continent. Cook, Joseph Banks and a nymph symbolising Australia gave speeches on the “greatness” and unity of the Britannia of the Southern Ocean.

Although an Aboriginal community lived at La Perouse on the opposite shore of Botany Bay, the re-enactment involved a troupe of Indigenous men from Queensland. They were directed by parliamentarian and entrepreneur Archibald Meston, who had previously toured Indigenous performers in his “Wild Australia” show.

It is unknown under what circumstances the Aboriginal men were recruited for the Federation re-enactment, or if they were paid.

Landing of Captain Cook at Botany Bay, 1770, by E. Phillips Fox (1902)
National Gallery of Victoria

Despite dramatising a beach-side skirmish between the Aborigines and British, the Federation performance cemented Cook as the conquering peacemaker. This was promoted by E. Phillips Fox, who was commissioned by the National Gallery of Victoria to paint The Landing of Captain Cook at Botany Bay, 1770 (1902).

This monumental work is a tableau – or frozen re-enactment — of Cook striding purposefully up the beach, stretching out his hand as he takes territorial possession. It was widely reproduced and circulated, becoming the best-known and influential image of Cook’s landing across Australia.

---

Read more:
An honest reckoning with Captain Cook’s legacy won’t heal things overnight. But it’s a start

---

The evolution of performances

Throughout the first half of the 20th century, the anniversary of the Endeavour’s arrival at Botany Bay was marked by performative gestures to the past. Dignitaries arrived by steamship, coming ashore to give speeches situating Cook as founder of the nation.

For instance, in 1930 at the height of the Depression, spectators were exhorted to “practice self-denial and self-reliance as exemplified in Captain Cook’s exploits”.

Although a full-scale re-enactment was staged in 1951 for the Federation jubilee, interest in Cook waned and the formalities were abandoned.

This changed dramatically in 1970, with the bicentenary of Cook’s Australian landing. Cook was suddenly everywhere, with government funding supporting pageants, memorials and other Cook novelties around the nation.

The nationalistic climax of months of events was an elaborate re-enactment at Kurnell, performed for the visiting Queen Elizabeth and her entourage. Directed by musical theatre aficionado Hayes Gordon, the spectacle was designed for global television, with actors selected after a nationwide search. Held on “Discovery Day”, it attracted a crowd of over 50,000 people.

Re-enactment of the first fleet arrival in Domain, Sydney, in 1938.
The Royal Botanical Gardens Sydney

Promoted as portraying the “birth of modern Australia”, this re-enactment capitalised on the groundswell of popular interest in Australia’s past. Emphasis was placed on historical accuracy, although nothing challenged the well-established nonsense of Cook’s party briefly confronting Indigenous peoples before peacefully claiming the continent.

To show how far the nation had progressed, “multicultural” schoolchildren and boy scouts and girl guides rose and fell in waves along the beach.

Protesting and mourning

Amid this “celebration”, diverse Aboriginal protests were under way, although they were little covered by the press.

At La Perouse, Aboriginal poet and activist Oodgeroo Noonuccal (Kath Walker) was among hundreds of protesters who boycotted the re-enactment and released funeral wreaths into the sea.

A silent vigil had been held the night before, and a “day of mourning” was observed at Sydney Town Hall and in other Australian cities.

Wreaths thrown into Botany Bay to mark the day of mourning, April 29 1970.
Image from the Tribune collection from the 1970 Cook Bicentenary protest, featured in the State Library of NSW’s upcoming exhibition, Eight Days in Gamay, opening late April.

In 1970, a second re-enactment was held in Cooktown, also witnessed by the queen. The original Endeavour had spent seven weeks there, undergoing repairs after running into the Great Barrier Reef.

Cooktown has a long record of Cook-related performances, though initially these were sporadic. But from 1960, the Cooktown Re-enactment Association organised an annual event.

The performances evolved from a battle with Aboriginal people to Cook landing and taking possession and, more recently, celebrations of acts of conciliation.

Queen Elizabeth greeted by a group of Indigenous children at a ceremony marking the bicentenary of Cook’s arrival in Cooktown.
www.abc.net.au

Future direction: same old or new path forward?

Until coronavirus and social distancing made all public events impossible, the federal government had slated to spend A$5.45 million on the Cooktown 2020 Expo, including a re-enactment of the landing of Captain Cook and his interactions with the Guugu Yimithirr bama.

As this historical overview of over a century of re-enactments of Cook’s landing has shown, these events have served to reinforce Australia’s imperial and British connections. They ignore the violence of Cook’s encounters with Aboriginal people and Indigenous resistance, and perpetuate the myth of Cook’s discovery of Australia.

You can hear Kate Darian-Smith discussing these ideas in an episode of our podcast, Trust Me, I’m An Expert, over here.

Kate Darian-Smith, Executive Dean and Pro Vice-Chancellor, College of Arts, Law and Education, University of Tasmania and Katrina Schlunke, Associate professor, University of Tasmania

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Friday essay: how Australia’s war art scheme fed national mythologies of WW1

Will Dyson sketching close to the German lines on the Western Front, 29 May 1918.
AWM E02439

Margaret Hutchison, Australian Catholic University

War is often seen as a death knell for the arts, but during the first world war the Australian government mobilised some of the country’s most renowned expatriate artists to paint the conflict. Hired essentially as eyewitnesses to war, these men were stationed at the front and tasked with creating art on the battlefield.

Will Dyson, Coming Out on the Somme, 1916, charcoal, pencil, brush and wash on paper, 56 x 47.2 cm
Australian War Memorial ART02276

The idea of using art to interpret and commemorate the war was first raised by Will Dyson, an Australian expatriate cartoonist working in Britain, who went to the Western Front as Australia’s first official war artist in late 1916. Dyson drew candid studies of Australian soldiers. In images such as Coming Out on the Somme (1916) he deftly captures the glazed detachment and vacant stares of the men who had just returned from, as he described it, “gazing on strange and terrible lands”.

Perhaps sensitive to the public at home, most Australian official artists avoided sketching the graphic violence of the war. But there were some exceptions. Will Longstaff’s sketchbook, for instance, contains an image of a dismembered leg, bone protruding from a mess of flesh and cloth. His composition shows the severed limb in the centre of the sketch with a grassy field of poppies in the background, an arrangement at odds with the human evidence of the impact of war.

Will Longstaff, Study of Dismembered Leg (detail), c. 1918.
AWM ART19796.021

By 11 November 1918, the Australian art collection consisted of an eclectic array of images of the battlefield. But it represented a very narrow view of the Australian war experience. Most official artists had been sent to France and Belgium. The eyewitness role of artists – a position they did not challenge – meant they painted only what they observed at the front. As a result, the collection was dominated by paintings of the soldiers and battlefields in Europe. Other theatres of war, such as the Middle East where only George Lambert had been stationed, were represented by much fewer images.

Official artist James Quinn working among the debris of the war on Mont St Quentin, France, 7 September 1918.
Australian War Memorial

The focus on the Western Front meant the army was privileged over other services, such as the Navy and Flying Corps. The absence of the Navy was particularly criticised by members of the Australian press at the time, who complained that while Britain and Canada had employed their best artists to paint naval pictures, the Australian Government had done nothing.

The Canadian and British art schemes also made concerted efforts to include the home front in their collections. And they employed women artists, albeit to paint women’s wartime labour, such as workers in factories. Additionally, the Canadian art scheme hired painters from a range of Allied countries, embracing diverse styles and interpretations of the conflict.

The Australian collection was more nationalistic in tone, employing only Australian artists. While some of the nation’s most eminent artists of the day painted for it, lesser known artists, many of whom had served in the Australian Imperial Force, were also commissioned.

Ellis Silas, Roll Call, 1920, oil on canvas, 131.8 x 183.5 cm.
AWM

Often images that less skilfully portrayed the war were included because of their eyewitness value, such as works by Ellis Silas, who had served as a signaller on Gallipoli in 1915.

The Australian collection also stood alone in its neglect of the war experience at home and of women artists. Missing from the collection were images of the preparations for conflict, the training camps, the embarkation of troops, women’s wartime efforts and experience, (including their roles as nurses and volunteers in the warzone and as paid or unofficial workers at home), and of the bitter political disputes that divided Australia during the war.

These lacunae in the collection were addressed to some extent in the decades after the war. But even then, the focus remained largely on a battlefield narrative – more narrowly defining “war experience” than either the British or Canadian art.

Artistic liberties

George Lambert’s iconic painting of the Australians climbing the cliffs on Gallipoli at dawn on 25 April 1915 is a fascinating example of post-war mythologising. Despite travelling to the peninsula in early 1919 to study the battlefields and create as accurate a representation as possible, he took some artistic liberties with this canvas.

Veterans complained that the soldiers should be depicted in the peaked cap of the early uniform they had actually worn in 1915. But Lambert painted all the men wearing the slouch hat, which had become synonymous with the Australian soldier, consolidating the painting’s distinctly Australian character.

George Lambert, Anzac, the Landing 1915, 1920–22, oil on canvas, 199.8 x 370.2 cm.
AWM ART02873

Other images also show an emerging national mythology. Dyson’s cartoons and sketches, many of which were a powerful indictment of the conduct of the war, represent ideas about an Australian type.

He portrayed the humour associated with the larrikin soldier in images such as Small Talk (1920). Depicting two soldiers in conversation in a bomb crater, he captures their droll joking: “No Brig., I says send me back to the boys – the transport’s no good to me I never joined the war to be a mule’s batman!”

Small Talk, 1920, oil on board, 53.4 x 69 cm.
AWM ART02430

Arthur Streeton painted the battlefields where Australian soldiers fought. He saw in soldiering life a deeper and more meaningful example of the development of a particularly Australian masculinity: “It[̓s] extremely novel and exciting over here and it’s the only way in which to form any idea of Australian manhood.”

Arthur Streeton, The Somme Valley Near Corbie, 1919, oil on canvas, 153 x 245.5 cm
AWM ART03497

Many official artists drew on the devastated landscape of the battlefield as an allegory for the destruction wrought by war. Taming the Australian bush, a trope popular with Australian audiences before the war, became survival on the battlefields of Europe and the Middle East.

Septimus Power, First Australian Artillery going into the 3rd Battle of Ypres, 1919, oil on canvas, 121.7 x 245 cm.
AWM ART03330

George Lambert was the only official artist stationed in the Middle East during the war. He interpreted this theatre in terms of his experience painting the Australian landscape. The light and colours of Australia permeated much of his wartime work, framing the experience of the soldiers and their environment in familiar imagery that made the conflict appear more immediate for audiences at home.

George Lambert, Magdhaba, March 1918, oil on canvas, 51.2 x 61.8 cm.
AWM ART09844

Australia did not employ any women as official painters during the war, but female artists created numerous images of their wartime experience, and their images show what the collection might have gained had they been commissioned. Australian born artist Iso Rae’s painting of the military camps in France was later acquired for the collection.

Iso Rae, Cinema Queue, 1916, France, pastel, gouache on grey paper, 47.8 x 60.6 cm.
AWM ART19600

Australia’s first world war art collection has been revised and reshaped across the last century and now represents a broader experience of the conflict from a more diverse range of artists. But the works created during and immediately after the war fed into a national mythology that privileged a narrative of the Australian soldier on the battlefield, coming at the expense of a more nuanced story of Australia in the war.

The Australian war art collection is held at The Australian War Memorial.

Margaret Hutchison, Lecturer in History, Australian Catholic University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Roman Mythology

7 Historical Myths

5 Myths About Emperor Hirohito

Today in History: 15 April 1912

The Titanic Sinks

On this day in 1912, the luxury liner and so-called unsinkable Titanic sank in the North Atlantic after hitting an iceberg.

 

ABOVE: RMS Titanic

ABOVE & BELOW: Launch of the Titanic

ABOVE: Grand Dining Room of the Titanic

ABOVE: Cross Section of the Titanic

ABOVE: Illustration of the Scene of Disaster

ABOVE & BELOW: The Titanic Sinking

The article below deals with some myths surrounding the Titanic:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17515305

The link below is to an article with some rare photos of the Titanic:
http://www.buzzfeed.com/thefalafel/11-never-seen-before-pictures-of-the-titanic-4x8q

A letter from one of the victims, penned before he boarded the Titanic has been found. The letter by Robert Douglas Norman can be read at the link below:
http://www.deadlinenews.co.uk/2012/04/09/titanic-discovery-victims-letter-discovered-in-national-archive/

Historic records can be viewed online for free until the 31st May 2012. For more information visit:
http://www.scotsman.com/news/records-of-the-tragedy-free-to-view-online-1-2224066

ABOVE: Captain of the Titanic – Captain E. J. Smith

ABOVE: Titanic Lifeboat

ABOVE: The Carpathia Rescued Survivors and
BELOW: Titanic Lifeboat Alongside the Carpathia

ABOVE: Titanic Survivors – Ida & Jean Hippach

ABOVE: J Bruce Ismay, Chairman of the White Star
Line who Survived

For more on those who died on the Titanic and those who survived visit:
– http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/Seven-Famous-People-Who-Missed-the-Titanic.html
– http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2012/0409/1224314547372.html

Here’s an article on pets on the Titanic:
http://www.neatorama.com/2012/04/11/the-dogs-aboard-the-titanic/

The video below is a simulation of how the Titanic is believed to have sunk:

For more, visit:
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/Why-the-Titanic-Still-Fascinates-Us.html

– http://www.encyclopedia-titanica.org/
– http://www.titanic.com/
– http://www.titanic1.org/
– http://www.titanic-titanic.com/
– http://www.the-titanic.com/Home.aspx
– http://www.titanicinquiry.org/

A museum exhibit on the Titanic has opened. See the link below for more info:
http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=54653

Marking the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, the feature film ‘Titanic’ is being released in 3D.

There is also a memorial cruise being organised.

For news on the cruise visit:
– http://news.uk.msn.com/odd-news/titanic-memorial-cruise-sets-sail-4
– http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nation-world/sns-rt-us-britain-titanicbre8370bx-20120408,0,1524453.story
– http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=54652
– http://www.bedfordshire-news.co.uk/News/UK-and-world-news/Titanic-memorial-cruise-sets-sail-602490.xnf

The book, ‘The Titanic for Dummies,’ by Stephen Spignesi was released in January 2012. For more on the book visit:

– http://www.courant.com/features/hc-titanic-for-dummies-0407-20120406,0,1506075.story

Article: Misconceptions About the Middle Ages (also called the Dark Ages)

The following link is to an interesting article on the Middle Ages, or rather, myths concerning the Middle Ages.

For more, visit:
http://www.neatorama.com/2012/02/29/five-common-misconceptions-about-the-middle-ages/