So as a school kid in Australia back in the nineties, I remember being taught, like many of my peers, the Captain Cook ‘discovered’ Australia. Except that wasn’t quite true, was it? To add all the qualifiers, Cook and his crew are probably best described as the first set of Europeans to visit the east coast of Australia …after the dutch sort of poked around in the west.
But very little discussion time was given to the people that had lived in Australia for tens of thousands of years prior.
Darren Rix and Craig Cormick’s Warra Warra Wai: How Indigenous Australians discovered Captain Cook, and what they tell about the coming of the Ghost People has one impressive but descriptive subtitle, asking us, ‘well, what about the people already there? What did they think?’
The first thing that has to be noted from the start thoughts that there were many different peoples living in Australia around the time of 1770. So there clearly must be multiple Cook-encounters that need to be documented and discussed. This was achieved, to quote the introduction, via a “blackfella-whitefella collaboration.” Darren Rix (a Gunditjmara-GunaiKurnai man) performed a lot of the interviews, while Craig Cormick did a lot of the archival work. So there are usually two parallel sources for each of the encounters; written sources from the British and oral histories from the locals.
The book covers multiple locations along the east coast that, based on his journals and diaries, Cook visited or spotted during the Endeavour voyage. The authors give each place their First Nations name (or sometimes, names) and the English name from Cook’s time. Then, for each location, they describe the area and share stories from the local First Nations groups who live there. The encounters varied—Cook barely spent time at Munda Bubal/Tolywiarar/Point Hicks where he first landed in April 1770, and he only made brief contact at several northern regions because the crew only stopped for supplies. But for places like Botany Bay/Kamay and Endeavor River/Waalumbaal Birri? The Endeavour had to be moored longer (especially when repairs were involved), so contact with local groups was more prolonged.
These sections vary significantly in focus. The authors asked each community the same general question: “What is it that whitefellas most need to know about your mob?” While some stories address Cook’s arrival directly, many others do not. Many of the stories here fall under the umbrella of Truth Telling; the process of sharing and acknowledging both historical truths and the injustices brought on by colonization, and examining their continuing cultural impact. There is a lot of focus here on of listening to First Nation’s voices and validating their experiences, while asking the rest of us to rethink the narratives we’ve perhaps accepted previously. So, people may choose to spend more time discussing the initial impacts of the Endeavour’s visit, as passed down from family, while others may share more contemporary stories about their community and their cultural practices. If you’ve not read anything from a transitional justice perspective before, it might take some getting used to. Past and present impacts? History, people and culture? They are not easily split and compartmentalized—and we shouldn’t intend to.
For the people who had more than the briefest encounters with Cook and other settlers, one of the most common, tragic themes was that of cultural clash and miscommunication. Contrary to popular belief, not all First Nations groups were immediately hostile to the newcomers. They were often wary, or outraged that proper protocols were not being followed when these strangers set foot on the land, certainly, but that doesn’t mean they were looking to start a conflict straight away. But it is questionable as to how much effort the British went to try and reach over the cultural gap. And sometimes all it would take was one poorly interpreted move and suddenly someone has a bullet in the leg. And even if initial contact was peaceful, subsequent interactions with Europeans often were not, especially if profit was involved—as shown by the encounters the Yuin had with sealers.
Responses to conflict also varied as well. Some groups were able to recruit help from neighboring regions when things escalated, but for others, this was not possible. And for many First Nations groups, the odds were truly stacked against them. Not only did the colonizers had the power that gunpowder lends them, but poisonings were not out of the question. There is also speculation as to whether or not small-pox was deliberately distributed. It’s not definitive, but it was a tactic the British had deployed before. The results of these conflicts were often the same though; loss of life and a great loss of language and culture. It’s staggering.
On a slightly lighter note: why not everyone necessarily had a poor opinion of James Cook, the same could not be said of Joseph Banks, the botanist. Banks was found to be almost universally disliked. This is not the first source I’ve read that has implied that Banks was a dick.
I listened to Warra Warra Wai as an audiobook, and for the most part the narration was very well done. The book has two narrators, one who read Cook’s journals and one who covered most of the stories. However, the audiobook copy I have does not have a pdf supplement, which is disappointing. While I am very familiar with the geography of Eastern Australia along the south, I have never been much further north than Rockhampton, so a map with all the First Nation names, etc would have been very handy. I had been meaning to look up about a particular mission in the far north that was mentioned near the end of the book, but that’s been made harder without a map—or an index. Audiobook listeners also miss out on the illustrations, which is a shame. Maybe I’ll pick up a hard copy next time I’m back home.
(And, as I worked out, listening to the audiobook also means that I had no clue how to spell some of the original First Nations names, especially the northern locations. I had to look them up.)
Warra Warra Wai is by no means a traditional historic text. But it does ask us to think of the people who were already there, and what impact the voyage of the Endeavour has had on them.
For cbr17bingo, this is Culture.