Public History Review

Vol. 28, 2021

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Citation: Daley, P. 2021. 
Assorted Bastards of 
Australian History. Public 
History Review, 28, 1–4. http://
dx.doi.org/10.5130/phrj.
v28i0.7788

ISSN 1833- 4989 | Published by 
UTS ePRESS | https://epress.
lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.
php/phrj

Assorted Bastards of Australian History

Paul Daley

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v28i0.7788

The image of explorer James Cook, sculpted in stone or cast in bronze, is probably the 
most ubiquitous representation of any historical figure in the Australian consciousness and 
landscape. Certainly, it’s hard to think of any long dead person pivotal to Australian history 
and all of its contests whose image is more recognised or recognisable.

Cook looms as large in Australian statuary as he does in nomenclature and, perhaps 
especially, psyche. To those who still deify him as the explorer at the vanguard of white- hatted 
colonial Enlightenment he remains the Neil Armstrong of his day – he who sailed where 
dragons be to bring English light and civility to the oldest continuous civilisation on the 
planet. To others of this continent, he is a sinister bogey man and a monster, the doorman who 
ushered in later colonisation with all its extreme violence, dispossession and ills with his east 
coast arrival in 1770 – in which his first act (just saying) was to personally shoot two Gweagal 
men at Kamai.

Cook’s stylised head – the regal nose and broad lips, that chiselled chin and firm jaw 
framed by the flowing hair, often peaked by the triangular admiralty commander’s hat – is as 
ubiquitous in our cultural, natural and urban landscape as he is in our white history books and 
Black oral histories. In 2013 Aboriginal sculptor Jason Wing reinforced this point with his 
bronze bust Captain James Crook, the statue’s head covered like that of a cat burglar or bank 
robber with a balaclava. The head of Cook – Crook – is instantly recognisable even though it is 
obscured.

Indigenous Australians and many others have drawn offence from white Australia’s 
deification of Cook as continental discoverer since governor Thomas Brisbane’s 1822 
dedication of the first plaque to the great navigator (who the Hawaiians had long since 
chopped into pieces and fed to the fish) on the cliffs close to where the Endeavour anchored 
at Kamay. Other white men (and women) personally killed more Aboriginal people than Cook 
or his crew. Yet for Indigenous people Cook – his name, his image, the contested history of 
him – is perhaps the most despised and offensive cultural shorthand for dispossession and 
oppression.

In early 2021 a person – or persons (as the cops said) – used a stencil and paint to impose an 
image of Cook’s unmistakable noggin onto the memorial dedicated to Tasmanian Nuenonne 
woman, Truganini, on Bruny Island, south- east Tasmania. As an exercise in Exocet- targeted 
offence against Indigenous sensibilities, this act of vandalism could hardly have been more 

DECLARATION OF CONFLICTING INTEREST The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with  
respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. FUNDING The author(s) received no  
financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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pointed. Truganini, wrongly cast in nineteenth and twentieth- century white Australian history and 
anthropology as the ‘last of the Tasmanians’, is actually a profound embodiment of Indigenous endurance 
and survival. She lived through the virtual apocalypse that descended on her people and never lost her 
agency, except perhaps in death when the Tasmanian Museum put her skeletal remains on display and 
later traded copies of various of her bones across the globe including with New York’s Museum of Natural 
History which, in return, sent the skull of a tyrannosaurus.

The modest monument on Bruny – vandalised several times previously – makes no grand claims about 
Truganini’s life (of the sort to which she is entitled) simply noting:

THIS MEMORIAL
IS DEDICATED TO
THE MEMORY OF

TRUGANINI
1812- 1876

Compare this to the more than 100 official and unofficial Cook statues and memorials across Australia – 
not least the most famous (or infamous) one that has stood in Sydney’s Hyde Park since 1874. It bears the 
inscription, ‘Discovered this territory 1770’.

Since at least the early twentieth century Indigenous rights activists had rightly viewed with mirth 
and contempt this giant bronze image of Cook and its discovery assertion. Their objections, if ever they 
were made publicly, would have fallen on deaf ears (as they still mostly do today) given that the colonists 
fallaciously believed they were witnessing the extinction of the Eora just as they were the passing of 
Truganini’s Nuenonne, and that the continent was (given the apparent absence of ‘civilised’ agriculture and 
archaeology of ancient monumental buildings) already effectively unsettled in 1770.

Indigenous activism has long focussed on this most distinctive of Cook statues, not least during 
the bicentenary of 1988 when the replica tall ships sailed into the harbour amid the Invasion Day 
mass Aboriginal protests around Sydney. It is testimony to the enduring potency of American cultural 

‘Crook’ – Cook bust with balaclava – by Jason Wing (National Gallery of Australia)

Daley

Public History Review, Vol. 28, 20212



imperialism, however, that it was only really in mid 2017 that the statue became a matter of public/political 
controversy when the television personality Stan Grant wrote something about how understandably 
offensive he found it.

He did so off the back of an unrelated controversy in the United States about Donald Trump’s defence of 
Confederate statues.

Other writers and many prominent Indigenous people had long been critiquing the white blindfold 
nature of monuments, statuary and nomenclature.

As you drive around this continent, stop and think about some of the names you’ll see on creeks, roads 
and beaches. It’s no coincidence there are so many places named Skeleton Creek in Queensland and Skull 
Creek in Gippsland, the Northern Territory and Western Australia. There is a Murdering Gully in Victoria, 
a Skull Hole in Queensland and a Massacre Waterfall in central- west New South Wales. I’ve walked the 
length of a lichen- lined furrow through a field of golden native grassland on the Atherton Tableland, 
wondering if the howling wind might not be the spirits crying. For the place, Boonjie – which was renamed 
Butchers Creek with the massacre of its custodians in 1887 – is replete with distressed spirits, a descendant 
of the dead has assured me.

The continent, seeded with Indigenous names and stories, has been progressively renamed. Cook started 
this process from the sea as he navigated Endeavour up the east coast in 1770. In many places this has been 
done not to commemorate the deaths of First Nations people, but the very act of mass murdering them.

Leading Indigenous activists, historians Gary Foley and Tony Birch, have for decades, for example, been 
blazing the trail on this nomenclature question, successfully taking on major conservative institutions, 
not least the University of Melbourne, over their dedication of bricks and mortar to eugenicists, radical 
assimilationists, the thieves of ancestral remains and other assorted bastards of Australian history.

And yet suddenly, in 2017, the fuse was lit about the Cook statue in Hyde Park by Stan Grant and we 
had the ‘statue wars’.

Things subsided. But the issue – the ‘wars’ – would flare up intermittently when statues of Cook and 
colonists who followed began to be vandalised with paint.

One of those targeted was the statue of Lachlan Macquarie, the fifth governor of New South Wales. 
The statue was dedicated in January 2013, an inscription associated with the monument reading, ‘He was 
a perfect gentleman, a Christian and supreme legislator of the human heart’. This is laughable and should, 
given all that was known about Macquarie’s bastardry by 2013, never have been put on the dedication. For 
if he was a gentleman, Macquarie was also a murderer – a syphilitic, calculating killer of Aboriginal men, 
women and children, and thief of Indigenous infants from massacre sites, as well as an early proponent of 
the tactic of ‘terror’ against the blacks around Appin, at the foot of the central highlands, whom he regarded 
as the enemy of his expanding civilisation.

The Cook statue in Hyde Park now attracts significant media attention. At best it belongs in a statue 
museum and, as fallacious as its dedication remains, it can perhaps be dismissed as a contemptible reflection 
of its times.

The same can’t be said of the Macquarie statue. It is not a colonial statue. There is no excuse for it.
As I’ve written elsewhere, ‘Its dramatic misrepresentation of Macquarie, given all that was already known 

about his humanitarian failings at the time of its casting, cannot easily be dismissed with claims that it 
merely reflects the prevailing sentiment of a bygone era. This statue and the words that accompany it could 
not be justified in 1816, let alone in 2013 or today. It is, arguably, of negligible historical or cultural value.’1

Fast forward to 2020 and the Black Lives Matter resurgence in the wake of the murder of George Floyd 
in the United States, continuing controversy around confederate statues and symbols and the toppling of 
statues of slavers in the United Kingdom. Black Lives protests naturally followed in Australian capitals.

Daley

Public History Review, Vol. 28, 20213



In Sydney, protestors converged on Hyde Park. Police, anticipating that Cook would be a target, moved in.
Perhaps the most potent image of that protest remains the photograph of mounted police – side by side 

with white, right wingers – protecting the 1874 Cook statue.
As Greens MP David Shoebridge tweeted, ‘This image tells you just who @nswpolice think they are here 

to protect and serve #BlackLivesMatter’.
The Cook statue still stands, of course. Protected by all sorts of ongoing surveillance and patrols.
It is likely to remain in Hyde Park, just a stone’s throw from that of Macquarie… at least until Australia 

gets a statue museum.
This seems like a good place to return to that first ever Cook monument dedicated in 1822 by Governor 

Brisbane – again, not friend of this continent’s Indigenes. He waged war against them in Bathurst and killed 
hundreds with musket fire and poison after Macquarie retreated to London, syphilitic, alcoholic, lost. The 
dedication on the plaque reads:

Under the Auspices of British Science
These Shores Were Discovered

by
James Cook & Joseph Banks

The Columbus and Maecenas of Their Time
This Spot Once Saw Them Ardent in the Pursuit of Knowledge

It would overly credit Brisbane and his lot to suggest they were somehow cognisant of an Indigenous 
sensibility for animated landscape – a country that at once encapsulates and is created by the stories of 
emergent men, women and their totems and the events and experiences that unfolds upon topography.

But that is what those who cast this monument unwittingly did.
For Kamay – This Spot – saw them arrive.
It’s one Cook memorial that is worth its weight in irony.

Endnotes
1. Paul Daley, ‘Heroes, Monuments and History’, Meanjin Quarterly, Autumn, 2018.

Daley

Public History Review, Vol. 28, 20214