Myth 1 – Cook was the first European to discover Australia
According to a recent survey 31 per cent of Australians think that James Cook was the first European to find Australia.1
The fact is that Cook’s 1770 voyage followed more than a dozen previous encounters by Europeans in the north-west, west and south of the continent throughout the 17th century – all of them more than a hundred years before Cook’s visit. There may even have been earlier Portuguese visits in the 16th century, and some historians have suggested that the Chinese Grand Fleet, under Admiral Zheng He, may have arrived here in the 15th century. Visiting long before Cook, men such as Willem Janszoon, Luis Vaz de Torres, Dirk Hartog, Frederick de Houtman and Abel Tasman are certainly not household names, as are Cook and Endeavour.
Cook can claim a couple of other ‘firsts’, though: in 1770, he was the first European to chart the east coast and the Endeavour crew were the first Europeans known to have landed on the east coast.
In fact, the oldest known foreign visitors to Australia were from modern-day Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. Makassan traders had been visiting and trading with people in northern Australia for hundreds of years and dugout canoes were traded from the Sepik River to the Torres Strait Islands for generations before Cook arrived there.
No European ‘discovered’ Australia. The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander inhabitants of this continent managed that all by themselves – some 60,000 years before any European turned up.
Painting of James Cook
Captain Cook by Nathaniel Dance (1735-1811), published 1969. State Library of Victoria, H32508
Myth 2 – Cook and Endeavour were in the First Fleet and brought convicts to Australia
According to the same survey, 47 per cent of Australians think that Endeavour arrived in Australia with the First Fleet in 1788 – and they are 100 per cent wrong!2
The First Fleet, under Captain Arthur Phillip, arrived in Botany Bay between 18 and 20 January 1788. By that time, Cook had been dead for nine years, Endeavour had been renamed Lord Sandwich, and in 1778, during the American War of Independence, the ship had been scuttled in Newport Harbor, Rhode Island, as an underwater defence against French attack.
The way many non-Indigenous Australians mix up Cook and Phillip is understandable – for many years Cook’s arrival was seen as a better foundational moment than a fleet full of convicts, and so 29 April (the date when Endeavour arrived at Botany Bay in 1770) was officially celebrated as the origin of white settlement. From the 1930s, the focus of national commemorations turned towards the First Fleet – but often didn’t mention the convicts. It wasn’t until the ‘convict stain’ began to be erased in the 1970s that the First Fleet became widely associated with the beginning of modern Australia.
In fact, Cook was the representative of the British Crown and claimed possession of the east coast of Australia on behalf of the Crown, naming it New South Wales. Cook’s arrival has therefore become the symbol of the European invasion and occupation of the continent, particularly for First Nations people.
Myth 3 – January 26 marks Cook’s arrival
Another fallacy. On 29 April 1770, Cook arrived in Stingray Bay (which he later changed to Botanist Bay, then Botany Bay – the area is now the Kamay Botany Bay National Park). January 26 was when the First Fleet arrived in Sydney Cove – 18 years later, in 1788. Governor Phillip moved the planned settlement from Botany Bay to Port Jackson (Sydney Harbour). Strangely, perhaps, the usually meticulous cartographer Cook didn’t even enter what Phillip called ‘the finest harbour in the world’, but merely sailed past.
Myth 4 – Cook circumnavigated Australia
That’s a ‘no’. Cook saw only the east coast of the continent, and was several thousand kilometres short of a circumnavigation.
Cook sighted the mainland near what is now called Point Hicks, in Victoria, and sailed north up the east coast before continuing to Batavia (now Jakarta, Indonesia). He didn’t ever see the north and west coasts of the continent, and the only southern region he encountered was on a later trip, when he sailed Tasmania’s east coast.
The first European to circumnavigate Australia was Matthew Flinders, from 1801 to 1803. Flinders was accompanied by Bungaree, the first Indigenous Australian known to have circumnavigated the continent.