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

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.

Editor’s note: This is an edited transcript of an interview with John Maynard for our podcast Trust Me, I’m An Expert. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised this article contains names of deceased people.

There are a multitude of Aboriginal oral memories about Captain James Cook, right across the continent.

As the research from Deborah Bird Rose shows, many Aboriginal people in remote locations are certainly under the impression that Cook came there as well, shooting people in a kind of Cook-led invasion of Australia. Many of these communities, of course, never met James Cook; the man never even went there.

But the deep impact of James Cook that spread across the country and he came to represent the bogeyman for Aboriginal Australia.

Even back in the Protection and Welfare Board days, a government car would turn up and Aboriginal people would be running around screaming, “Lookie, lookie, here comes Cookie!”

I wrote about Uncle Ray Rose, sadly recently departed, who’d had a stroke. Someone said, “How do you feel?” And he said, “No good. I’m Captain Cooked.”

Cook, wherever he went up the coast, was giving names where names already existed. Yuin oral memory in the south coast of NSW gives the example of what they called Gulaga and Cook called “Mount Dromedary”:

[…] that name can be seen as the first of the changes that come for our people […] Cook’s maps were very good, but they did not show our names for places. He didn’t ask us.

Cook has been incorporated into songs, jokes, stories and Aboriginal oral histories right across the country.

Why? I think it’s an Aboriginal response to the way we’ve been taught about our history.

Read more: Captain Cook wanted to introduce British justice to Indigenous people. Instead, he became increasingly cruel and violent

Myth-making persists but a shift is underway

I came through a school system of the 50s and 60s, and we weren’t weren’t even mentioned in the history books except as a people belonging to the Stone Age or as a dying race.

It was all about discoverers, explorers, settlers and Phar Lap or Don Bradman. But us Aboriginal people? Not there.

We had this high exposure of the public celebration of Cook, the statues of Cook, the reenactments of Cook – it was really in your face. For Aboriginal people, how do we make sense of all of this, faced with the reality of our experience and the catastrophic impact?

We’ve got to make sense of it the best way we can, and I think that’s why Cook turns up in so many oral histories.

I think wider Austr