We’re still on our Cook itinerary. Next stop his first landing place in Australia – Botany Bay. Cook got here on 28 April 1770 direct from Cape Farewell in New Zealand. He had secret instructions from the Admiralty in London to find the extent of the Australian continent which was then completely unknown. Earlier Dutch explorers had reached Western Australia over a hundred years previously, and the western, northern and southern coasts were known – but the east was a complete mystery. And no known contact had ever been made between Europeans and indigenous people. Cook sailed up the east coast from Point Hicks (named after the Lieutenant who first spotted land – Cook was a very modest man and never named anything after himself or his family) until he found Botany Bay where he stopped for eight days. It was originally named Stingray Bay (the Endeavour’s crew found the shallow bay full of the fish weighing up to and over 300 pounds/150kg!) but changed it before he left because of the extraordinary number of botanical specimens collected by Banks & Solander.

Here is the first landing place:

 

The formal monument dedicated to Cook is in the background; by Ali is a plinth explaining that by Cook family tradition the first European to land in NSW was Midshipman Isaac Smith who later became Admiral Smith RN. The area around the landing place is now a very pleasant National Park with an excellent visitor centre.

Here is the site of Cook’s flagstaff:

 

There are three flags flying – uppermost is the Australian national flag, and beneath that on the right is the state flag of NSW. On the left is the Aboriginal flag which now flies in tandem with the official national flag all over the place.

Here is the “stream” from which Cook’s crew managed to fill hundreds of water casks:

It has been restored to as far as we can tell its original condition - this is what they had to drink! No need for health warning around it though, because no-one in their right mind now would touch it! Just another small reminder of how easy we have it nowadays.

Cook’s landing was opposed by a group of three Aborigines. At least, he thought it was and neither side could understand the other’s language of course. Cook by contemporary standards was a very humane man – so he discharged a musket, over their heads. It had no effect, so he shot the smallest native in the legs with “small shot”. This caused them to run off. It is now known, contrary to the views of the time, that Aborigines had a very strong sense of land ownership with clearly demarked boundaries. Strangers were required to formally request entry at the border, challenged and then admitted by invitation. This is what happened to Cook, and as he utterly failed to comply with the unknown rituals he and his crew were ostracised – the natives continued their daily business in and around Botany Bay with no effective further contact with the Europeans. Cook and his crew were astounded as the Maoris had behaved completely differently.

The last native chief of the area died in 1843, and the tribe Cook met is extinct. Smallpox broke out amongst the Aborigines within two years of the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788, killing between 50 and 90% of the Aboriginal population of eastern Australia. Their culture had existed for something like 50 000 years, and was extinguished almost like switching off a light moments after First Contact through disease and then genocide. The flag pictured above is a poignant reminder that Aborigines only achieved citizenship of Australia, by referendum, in 1967.