Dan Snow's History Hit - Captain Cook: The Aboriginal Perspective

Episode Date: April 30, 2021

Captain Cook has been celebrated, wrongly, as the first European to discover Australia but many now believe it is time to reappraise his legacy particularly in light of the devastating effect it had on the native Aboriginal people of Australia. Professor John Maynard is a Worimi man and Director of Aboriginal History at The Wollotuka Institute. He joins the podcast to explain what Cook's landing at Botany Bay meant for the Aboriginal people at the time and right through the generations to today and into the future. He believes it's time that we had an honest reckoning with Cook's legacy and that this is essential for reconciliation and creating a better way forward.

Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History. You know I love an anniversary and that's why it's very embarrassing that last year we completely missed a very big anniversary, the 250th anniversary of Captain Cook arriving on the east coast of Australia. Captain Cook celebrated, wrongly as it turns out, for years as the person who discovered Australia. For generations there's been a sort of unquestioning reverence for Captain Cook and that expedition everything he achieved but now on this particular anniversary we are more open to hearing other points of view. Professor John Maynard is a War of My Man from New South Wales. He's one of the world's most respected voices on indigenous history He's an Aboriginal Australian and I wanted to get him on the podcast to talk about Captain Cook, what that voyage meant and at the time has meant for subsequent generations and what perhaps it might mean today and into the future. It was a great pleasure talking to Professor Maynard. He's the Director of Aboriginal History at the Wollotuka

Institute and he thinks that it's about time. We had an honest reckoning with Cook's legacy, and that's essential to charting a way forward. If you want to watch 18th century maritime history, then trust me, I've got plenty of it on historyhit.tv. Historyhit.tv works on every continent, in every jurisdiction. You simply go to the website, historyhit.tv, you pay a very small subscription, and then you get to watch the Netflix for History. Endless, endless, almost endless videos about history, programs, some of the ones that you've loved in the past that we've licensed, others that we've made brand new, fresh out of the box. So please head over there. At the moment, there's a battle royale at the top of our

most watched chart between Elna Janneger with her medieval history series and still hanging in there is Tristan Hughes, host of the Ancients podcast with his program about the lost legion of the ninth. Go and make yourself felt. Go and make your eyeballs count in that debate over at historyhit.tv. But in the meantime, everybody, enjoy this chat with John Maynard. John, thank you for coming on the podcast. Great honour to have you on. Pleasure to be here, Dan. When I was a kid in England, we spent the whole of one semester, one term at school, doing Captain Cook. We dressed up. I was a botanist. There were soldiers, marines, sailors.

Some kid got to be Captain Cook, which I was very jealous about. And we spent the whole time, and it gave me a great passion for 18th century history. I still, after 40 years, I still have to remind myself that was an incredibly partisan view of Captain Cook. How is he remembered in your community? How would young people my age think and talk about Captain Cook? Yeah, well, certainly in an Aboriginal community setting, Captain Cook's the bogeyman. We've come through, certainly from my generation, growing up in the 50s and 60s, there was a lot of that commemoration of Cook and the statues and 1770 was a revered time. Australia was discovered, but the reality is Cook didn't

discover Australia. I mean, the Dutch were here before him, the Spanish were here before him, the Portuguese were here before him, the Macassans were trading from north of Australia before him. And we as Aboriginal people, in any Western scientific understanding now, have been on this continent for 65,000 years, upwards of 65,000 years. And that's the difference in that understanding. of 65,000 years. And that's the difference in that understanding. I will say, I mean, I have great admiration for Cook as a navigator and certainly as a captain of his crew. I mean, he had great devotion in his crew. He was one of the world's greatest ever navigators. There's no doubt about that. But the point about discovering Australia, he didn't discover Australia.

And secondly, for me, probably what is the critical thing in looking at Cook is examining his orders from the Crown or from the Admiralty, which in a sense was from the Crown, that if he found the Great Southern Continent, he was to map the coastline. If there are natives there, he was to open dialogue and discussion and gain consent to establish a couple of trading posts on that continent. But, of course, we know that he sailed up the entire east coast of Australia.

He didn't open up any discussion or gain any consent and sailed onto Possession Island, a small rocky outcrop off northern Queensland, planted a flag down there and claimed the entire east coast of Australia in the name of the crown. So he went against his orders in that respect. The one telling thing from Cook's diaries himself, he was at Kamei, which is Botany Bay was the name that he gave, when he first went ashore, and he was the man who fired a musket.

Two Aboriginal men come down with spears and they certainly made a hell of a racket from the British perspective and Cook's estimation was they weren't welcome. And he said all they seemed to want from us was to be gone. So there was no dialogue, discussion or consent. And there were some spears thrown and Cook fired a shot. There was an older Aboriginal man and an Aboriginal youth.

He fired a shot over their heads first off and that didn't stop them. They threw some more spears which landed at the feet of the guys off the Endeavour and Cook fired another shot at their legs. And the young boy, the youth, took off but the older Aboriginal man stayed there and continued. And at that point, Cook shot him again and he was hit in the chest and wounded, or possibly died later on. We're not to know of that.

But that was the first, how can you say, meeting and there was no dialogue, discussion or consent game. And as I said, Cook said in his diary, all they seemed to want from us was to be gone. Among Aboriginal peoples, subsequently Captain Cook, that name summarised, if you like, was a sort of byword for the arrival of the British, of the colonisation, of the transformation of their world. Absolutely. It led to a collision of seismic proportions between two completely differing cultures. I mean, Aboriginal culture was all about caring for the environment and ensuring it was handed over to successive generations. No disrespect, but Western society is all about exploitation and profit and using the land to the maximum advantage and taking land that didn't belong to them in the first instance. So it all ties to Cook, and Cook and Banks certainly influenced Britain

to make the step to turn what was to become Port Jackson and Sydney into a penal settlement. And can you describe to me the effect that that had on the Aboriginal population, just that generation and the ones that followed? Oh, absolutely catastrophic. I was just been talking only recently about 1788 with the arrival of the First Fleet and certainly Governor Philip

and the British Marines. In 1789, there was a smallpox outbreak in Port Jackson, what is today Sydney. And Captain Tench, one of the British Marines, they were all alarmed how this happened because there had been no one who had recorded anywhere, even going back to Dampier, that any Aboriginal people had pockmarks or marks of smallpox havoc upon them. And it was the same with the British in the first 12 months in 1788 through to 1789. And then suddenly smallpox erupted.

Philip himself estimated that somewhere between 50% of the population of what is now inner Sydney was decimated and the Aboriginal population fled the scene. The whole harbour was littered with decaying and dead Aboriginal bodies from the smallpox outbreak. To me, there was the very well-known Australian economic historian of the 1980s, Noel Butlin, who estimated that six decades after the British arrival, with smallpox, influenza, sexually transmitted diseases, chickenpox, a whole host of diseases, violence and the depletion of resources. Aboriginal population in Australia, which is how far widespread it was only after six decades, was decimated by somewhere to between 60

to 90 percent. And this is also important to bear in mind because Butlin estimated that the Aboriginal population was much higher than previously thought. He said there was over a million, which ties to what Governor Phillip actually thought at the time. And it's interesting that just before this smallpox outbreak in Sydney, that Phillip was saying, we were led to believe that this was a small population. And quite clearly, just within a 10-mile radius of Port Jackson, there's over 1,500 Aboriginal people. And we can see from the smokes and the fires inland that quite clearly the Aboriginal populations go into the interior of the continent as well.

Philip and Tench and quite a few of the others were conciliatory in their efforts to make contact and make things right with the Aboriginal people of that locality. But one guy, Ross, who was the commander of the British Marines, he didn't carry the same sentiments. And he actually wrote in one of his diaries, they're not the peaceful, lovable people we are being led to believe. And it's my point that Ross and the British Marines that were at Port Jackson at that time, quite a number of them had previously been in North America, particularly with Amherst and Gage and the war with Pontiac.

And one of the most important points to remember about that was the distribution of smallpox-infected blankets to the Pontiac and the Indian population, which decimated them. Now, there's no proof to say that's what happened in Sydney, but from Tench's account, we know that the British stores at Port Jackson were broken into just before this smallpox outbreak. We know from Tench's diary that the British doctors at Port Jackson had very older jars of smallpox. They'd carried them to Sydney. They were in those stores. And there's no account of what happened to them after.

So you can't prove that. But it does question the whole point of opening Pandora's box suddenly and the Aboriginal population is absolutely decimated. I actually said the other day to a group I was talking to, when you think that 60 to 90% of the population's been decimated, you have to look at dropping some atom bombs on Australia today and take out 60 to 90% of the population to understand the catastrophic impact of that. Because a lot of the people that are taken off are the elders, the knowledge elders, the older people. And this would have been an absolutely catastrophic impact on Aboriginal cultures and society. You're listening to Dan Snow's History and I'm talking to Professor John Maynard about Captain Cook. More after this. Okay, Tristan, you've got 50 seconds.

Go. Right, so Dan's given me a few seconds to sell the Ancients podcast. What is the Ancients, I hear you say? Well, it's like Dan's show, except just ancient history. We've got the groundbreaking new archaeological discoveries. This seems to be the oldest known dated depiction of the animal world, as far as we can tell, anywhere in the world. We've got the big names. It's one of those great things Pompeii it's kind of forever rising from the dead and from destruction. We've got the big topics. The man

destroys seven legions in a day no one in history has done that. Subscribe to the ancients from history hit wherever you get your podcasts from. Oh, and Russell Crowe, if you're listening, we would love to have you on The Ancients. Spread the word, people. Spread the word. Land a Viking longship on island shores. Scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt. And avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series Chasing Shadows,

where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, be spies, teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. the really interesting thing it seems to me is that we're re-evaluating this history for two reasons one is that we for whatever reason we've arrived at a place where we want to revise these jingoistic visions of our past but two is because of the environmental catastrophe we face we suddenly realize there are consequences absolutely to that entirely different way of extraction and settlement the aboriginal peoples and western european people embracing liberal economic capitalist market you know whatever there's kind of two parallel related tracks here aren't there

absolutely and that's a critically important point and And I totally agree with it. We're at a point in history that is really critical that the world takes the right path. And I look at Aboriginal culture and society. We were here in the time before time began. Our people came directly out of the dream time of the creative ancestors, and we lived and kept the earth as it was on the very first day. The whole society was based upon looking after the earth and then handing it on to the next generation. Today, as I said earlier, it's all about exploitation and profit. And I mean, we're seeing rising sea levels, rising temperatures, we're seeing rising sea levels, rising temperatures, catastrophic storms, pandemics. The whole situation in the globe today is very, very scary. And Indigenous peoples around the world carry

knowledge. Our people come through a number of ice ages. And the reality is there is that knowledge there. And really, it is so important to look after Mother Earth. We're on one small speck in this great universe. And the reality is we need to care for it. John, speaking of that traditional knowledge, how has that knowledge survived? How has that corpus of stories and experience survived? The decimation of your people, the catastrophe that you've endured. How have you been able to piece that together and access it? In Southeastern Australia, it was the full onslaught of what came in 1788. And as that

spread across Australia, and as I said before, in the first six or seven decades, it was massive across the continent. But it wasn't until much later in some places like certainly the Arnhem Land, Central Australia and the Kimberley, that those impacts came at the levels that first impacted in, say, Sydney. But knowledge was retained and passed on. In Southeastern Australia, in some sense, we can thank the British as well, because there were people who recorded Aboriginal stories, songs and language. Well, I'm from Newcastle, which is north of Sydney. And here in the 1820s, there was a British missionary, Lancelot Edward Threlkeld, and he was based here with the local Aboriginal people.

And with the aid of a fully initiated Aboriginal man, Threlkeld, who had some linguistic background, recorded the language. And then he also recorded something like 27 of the traditional stories of this region. And some of those stories related to earthquake. Newcastle was struck by an earthquake in 1989, 13 people dead and millions of dollars of damage that was done.

And they suddenly looked at that particular story, which was the Aboriginal story was related that this place had always been prone to earthquake. So stories that Aboriginal people have carried and passed on quite clearly show elements of the environment that you need to be aware of. And there's been a lot of those stories across the continent that were turned into children's fairy tales or myths or legends. It's critically important to go back and examine those stories. In other areas of Australia, of course, as I said,

Central Australia, Arnhem Land or the Kimberley, stories are still there, still being passed on to groups. And back in southeastern Australia, we were in a process of putting together a fragmented jigsaw puzzle, but these pieces are there and you're putting them back into the puzzle. Can you just help me to rehearse why Aboriginal Australians were so unequal

when they faced Europeans armed with the microbes, the metals, the engineering that arrived with Cook? I know this is a big question, but what was it about the way they lived that left them vulnerable to the weapons, the techniques of these outsiders? Well, it was certainly through isolation and protection against diseases like smallpox and the other diseases that came with them, which we had no immunities. And again, it's that first onslaught of that arrival and that decimation of such high levels of loss of life really put us at an incredible disadvantage.

And of course, you're up against guns. That's the leveller in many respects. So there was a great loss of life and that had a serious impact on what happened. How should we think about that voyage now, Captain Cook, his arrival, now that we are able to make a more dispassionate evaluation of it? I've said before to quite a number of groups, look,

I have great admiration for Cook, as I said, as a navigator and certainly as a leader of his crews and as a mapmaker. He was unparalleled. Some of these maps were still being used in the 20th century. The guy was a freak as far as that goes as a map maker. And again, I come back to the point, he didn't discover Australia. There were many before him. And I think that's critically important. He still needs to be recognised for what he did, certainly as a voyager and incredible leader of his crew. But certainly in an Aboriginal sense, he doesn't sit at all. I said he's the bogeyman of all that come after.

And Aboriginal people still carry Yuma. You know, they see, you know, someone from the government coming and they'll say, looky, looky, here comes Cookie. You know, so everything goes back to James Cook, even today. Are you in a place now in Australia where there is a dialogue, where there is a way of rethinking differently about Australia Day? Like, where's this journey end, do you think? Aboriginal people, we've got nothing to celebrate with the 26th of January. I mean, they didn't even arrive on that day. This is the weirdest thing about the 26th of January.

They'd been there nearly two weeks, and they'd arrived at Botany Bay. I mean, the only ones who went ashore that day were Philip and the Marines who raised a flag and they'd been here for nearly two weeks. All the convicts were still locked on the ship, the men and the women. So that was the moment they raised that flag. There's also a celebration that's been going on for many years in Australia now, Survival Day, which is the Aboriginal celebration on that particular day. And there is massive following of that event. You've got tens of thousands of people in Brisbane, in Sydney, in Melbourne, here in Newcastle, right across the continent, who actually celebrate with Aboriginal people on Survival Day. And that's growing each year into massive numbers and marches to celebrate

Aboriginal culture. And so do you think Australia is going to look very different? Look across the Tasman. New Zealand feels to me like they've embarked on a real conversation about this. And there have been kind of quite profound changes to New Zealand politics and society. Absolutely. They actually signed a treaty there. That was the start that marked the big difference to what happened here. I would say that the Maori brothers and sisters would probably disagree with you to say that it's all rosy there. It's not. There are issues that's still to be faced in New Zealand, but they're certainly ahead of Australia as far as their dealings with issues. And I think we still have a long way to go. The country, I mean, as far as the frontier wars,

I mean, they won't recognise that there was warfare. Massacres were conducted in this country. We can't move forward and heal from the past unless we recognise it. And it's only then that we can join hands together and we can heal from the past. But there's still this barrier and reluctance to move forward and recognise these things that have happened in the past. And Australia still has a long way to go. Let me finish up by saying, what does recognising that past really mean in practical terms in the present? Does it mean changing public spending, thinking about reparations,

focusing on health and education outcomes? Why does history really matter here? Absolutely critically important, Dan. And I mean, when you look at it today, any statistic you want to look at as far as Australia is concerned, be it housing, employment, health, education, highest rates of incarceration. Aboriginal people have the worst statistics in the country and it's critically important to deal with that. The problems we've had, not just recently, but over decades and decades and decades,

is government's attitude is we know what's best for, and this is the policy we put in place. They've always should have sat down with Aboriginal people to work through what the issues are and how they can be fixed and dealt with. And it's only when we come together as a group of people on this continent to sort that out that we can actually move forward. And history is embedded in all of that. You had the stolen generations, as I've said, thousands of Aboriginal kids removed

from their families across the early parts of the 20th century, right through to the 1970s, and I would argue still happening today. And the reality is the recognition of that. That happened back in the 80s, but it's still there. I mean, the healing process of all of these things that have happened in the past. All of these kids were put into institutions, no education. The boys trained as farm labourers, the girls to be trained as domestic servants. A lot of those girls finished up pregnant in households. I mean, the sexual abuse that happened to both the boys and the girls in those institutions. I mean, the sexual abuse that happened to both the boys and the girls in those institutions, all of this stuff, there's a lot of healing to happen.

The trauma for Aboriginal people has just been intergenerational and we need to deal with that and fix that issue if we are to move forward. Thank you very much, John Memore. Thank you very much for coming on the podcast and talking about this on the big anniversary. Only to you, please, Dan.mar. Thank you very much for coming on the podcast and talking about this on the big anniversary. Any two, please. Dan, thanks for having me on, buddy.

I feel the hand of history upon our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished. Hope you enjoyed the podcast. Just before you go, bit of a favour to ask.

I totally understand if you don't want to become a subscriber or pay me any cash money. makes sense. But if you could just do me a favour, it's for free. Go to iTunes or wherever you get your podcast. If you give it a five-star rating and give it an absolutely glowing review, purge yourself, give it a glowing review, I'd really appreciate that. It's tough weather, the law of the jungle out there, and I need all the fire support I can get. So that will boost it up the charts. It's so tiresome, but if you could do it, I'd be very, very grateful.

Thank you.