Today marks the 250th anniversary of modern day Australia and here’s why I think we should celebrate

April 29th, 2020 marks the 250^th anniversary of the ‘discovery’ and charting of Australia's east coast by Captain James Cook and the Endeavour. As our country gathers to celebrate this significant chapter in our nation’s history, it is vital that we do so in the entirety of this nation’s history, with over 65 thousand years of stories.

By John Paul Janke

I am Wuthathi from the Shelburne Bay region of Eastern Cape York and Murray Islander from Mer - the most easterly inhabited island of the Torres Strait.

I want to share some of the moments and people in our nation’s history that I find extraordinary.

By the age of 27, I had already achieved so many things.

Attained a driver’s licence, graduated from school, started a career in the Commonwealth public service, travelled to various parts of Australia, played sport for this country and travelled overseas.

By comparison, at 27, James Cook – a Yorkshire man born in 1728 - had been a merchant navy apprentice, worked on trading ships in the Baltic Sea, was in command of his own vessel, had volunteered for service in the Royal Navy, learned to map, navigate and chart and served in the Seven Years' War.

I reference James Cook here as I’m an admirer of Cook, his voyages into the Pacific, an avid reader of his journal and am fascinated by his interactions, his thoughts and his writings on Aboriginal people – my people.

Despite those differences, Cook and I have a few things in common.

We both loved the sea, he as a navigator and explorer and me as a Saltwater man from Mer Island and Wuthathi Country.

We also both didn’t get married till our mid 30's and decide to start a family roughly around the same age. Although my settling down was buying a house and his was undertaking three epic voyages, mapping and charting the Pacific for the British Empire.

Critically, both of us in our formative years weren’t taught much about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, history, cultures and lifestyles.

For Cook, Indigenous Australians were unknown and invisible. And for me during my years of academic life it was the same.

Some 30 years ago, I was the first Indigenous student to graduate from a private boy’s school in Canberra.

In my eight years at that school and in fact my entire student life, I was taught next to nothing about the world’s oldest continuous living culture.

I learned more about Egyptian and Greek Cultures, Ancient Sumerian, Aztec and Myan Empires, and Native Americans.

I could name more First Nations of North America than I could of my own continent and its First Peoples. Something at that time I probably had in common with nearly all Australians.

For her PhD, Robyn Moore from the University of Tasmania analysed portrayals of Australianness in secondary school history textbooks from 1950 to 2010.

This time frame covered a period of significant social change in Australia, symbolised by the transition from the White Australia era of the 1950's and 1960's, to the multicultural modern day society which continues today. She found that textbooks reflect these broad social changes.

She also found that textbooks published for my generation, and the generations before openly taught a celebratory version of history in which my people were either absent or derided.

She writes: “Aborigines are only mentioned occasionally in textbooks from this era. When Aborigines are included, the portrayals are usually negative.”

Where Aboriginal people “appear only momentarily” in the main text, books cover non-Aboriginal experiences in great detail, Aboriginal experiences are cursory which implies that “Australian history is the story of white Australians.”

Back then, a student’s access to knowledge and understanding about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures depended on individual schools, principals and teachers’ enthusiasm and energy.

Textbooks told us that Captain Cook discovered Australia, Aboriginal people were nomadic hunter gatherers and the noble savages. There was no text talking about Aboriginal nations, of Sovereignty, of achievements, of Frontier Conflict, of invasion, of theft of land and of massacres.

Co-incidentally, I was born in 1968 - the year anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner gave the Boyer Lectures — a watershed moment for Australian history.

Stanner argued that Australia’s sense of its past, its very collective memory, had been built on a state of forgetting, which couldn’t “be explained by absent-mindedness”

He said: “It is a structural matter, a view from a window which has been carefully placed to exclude a whole quadrant of the landscape. What may well have begun as a simple forgetting of other possible views turned under habit and over time into something like a cult of forgetfulness practised on a national scale.”

We now know that learning about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures allows students to develop respect for diversity and understanding of cultural difference.

The Australian Reconciliation Barometer shows the majority of Australians believe it’s important to learn about Indigenous history and cultures.

It provides all students with a rich and well-rounded knowledge of Australia’s history. The cross-curriculum priority of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures provides the Australian public with what they want.

The inclusion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander content in the national curriculum cannot be emphasised enough.

I recall the only Aboriginal study we did during my time at school was reading Thomas Keneally’s novel The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith.

Kenneally’s 1972 novel is based in part on historical events, particularly the crimes committed by Jimmy Governor, an Aboriginal man from New South Wales.

In 1900, Governor was a key figure involved in the killing of nine Europeans, including five women and children.

After fourteen weeks on the run with his brother Joe, Governor was arrested and sentenced to death for the murders. He was hanged at Darlinghurst jail on the 14th of January 1901, days after the declaration and ‘birth’ of the Australian nation.

It is widely accepted that Governor’s execution was delayed so as to not to spoil the birthday party.

We read it as part of my school’s English syllabus, not as part of a History subject.

I recall my English teacher taking me aside before we commenced the book and said that if I found the book difficult to read, it was okay to change classes.

For me, there was no Aboriginal history as part of Australian history.

How I wished things were different.

I love how writer Bruce Pascoe notes in his 2007 book Convincing Ground:

“Australia is a magnificent country. We know that, We swim in her seas and rivers, we toast her sunsets with sips of teas and home grown wine. We know her worth and love her for nurturing us. We are a strong, resourceful, friendly and humorous people but too few of us now much more than a fairy-tale history, a story which insults all of us and insults our land.”

Bruce writes that ‘we can't reverse the past, but believes we can bring in our soul from the fog of delusion.’

It is a seminal work only bettered by his 2014 work Dark Emu.

2020 marks the 250^th Anniversary of the ‘discovery’ and charting of the East Coast by Cook and the Endeavour.

Australia should celebrate Cook’s charting of the East Coast. It is a remarkable feat. It closed the loop on the charts of the “great southern continent” and of course would set the foundation for the arrival of Arthur Phillip and the 1, 480 people aboard the First Fleet some 18 years later.

For me, as we celebrate the 250th Anniversary of Cook’s arrival, we need to do so in the entirety of this nation’s history.

Firstly, we need to celebrate that for over 65,000 years before Cook and the many others that arrived, every part of the continent was inhabited, occupied and owned.

As Justice Jayne Jagot of the Federal Court of Australia noted in her 2017 address to the Law Society of New South Wales Young Lawyers’ Conference:

“It seems that every part of the land, no matter how apparently inhospitable, was woven into the complex social, cultural and spiritual network of Aboriginal people. 

The archaeological record shows that the Aboriginal people also cultivated the land, making use of the animals, plants, soils, and minerals, including in extensive trade networks.  Australia far indeed from “nobody’s land”; was land that had been occupied by one people, joined in a unified culture, which had continued uninterrupted for longer than any other.”

How many Australians know that by Cook’s arrival in 1770 some 36 contacts had been made by Europeans, many of them resulting in significant charting of the coastlines.

How many Australians know of this map from 1644 drawn from the voyages of Abel Tasman during 2 separate voyages in 1642 & 1644.

Or this map, made in 1744 by English map engraver Emanuel Bowen (based on earlier French map c 1664) and used by Cook.

It was the first English map showing only the continent now known as Australia.

For some reason Bowen omitted the 1642-1644 charting of the southern coast of the mainland and the northern coast of the island state of Tasmania.

How many Australians know that Cook on board the Endeavour also had copies of the Vaugasidy Chart from de Brosses' Histoires des Voyages aux Terres Australes, Alexander Dalrymple's book An Account of the Discoveries Made in The South Pacifick Ocean, Previous to 1764 and the Vagne chart, all of which showed that there was a strait south of New Guinea.

Whilst knowledge of those maps is important, we cannot respect those maps without knowing this map.

This is all part of our history.

As part of the 2020 anniversary, I would like to see every school in Australia be provided with one of these maps.

It is the most visual cross-cultural tool I’ve ever seen that graphically acknowledges this country’s history dating back since time began.

As we honour Cook for sailing up the east coast we should also celebrate the Aboriginal nations that he sailed past that have been here for tens of thousands of years.

The Yuin, Thurawal, Eora, Kuringai, Awabakal, Worimi, Birpai, Dunghutti, Bundjalung, Yuggera, Wakka Wakka, Darumbal, Kuku Yalingi, Guugu Yimithirr, and of course my mob - the Wuthathi.

These are the some of the coastal mobs up the east coast and just a handful of the 300 plus nations that were here prior to 1770.

A few years ago during discussions on Australian history with my circle of friends – friends that I went to school with since the 1970's, none of them had ever heard of Cook’s secret instructions.

“Secret instructions?” They questioned. They thought I was making it up.

How many Australians know of Cook’s secret instructions, issued to Cook on the 30th of July, 1768, over 250 years ago from the British Admiralty ahead of the voyage of the Endeavour.

The secret instructions contained two sets of instructions – the first relating to observing Venus, the second, ordering him to go and “make discovery of” the great southern continent.

So significant are the secret instructions and Cook’s Journal that they are manuscripts number 1 and 2 at the National Library of Australia (NLA).

The secret instructions included a letter of “hints” to Cook, his botanist Joseph Banks and the accompanying Swedish-born naturalist, Daniel Solander, before they sailed to the Pacific to observe the transit of Venus across the sun.

The hints to “Captain Cooke, Mr Bankes and Solander from James Douglas, the 14th Earl of Morton and president of the Royal Society in London which in February 1768 petitioned King George III to support the passing of Venus and “discovery” expedition.

Douglas’s hints advised the expedition to treat with kindness and understanding any Indigenous people encountered.

He urged Cook and his scientists to show “the utmost patience and forbearance with respect to the natives of the several lands where the ship may touch” and proceed with an understanding that asserted, unambiguously, the Indigenous ownership of the land.

Douglas urged them:

• To check the petulance of the sailors and restrain the wanton use of firearms
• To have it still in view that shedding the blood of these people is a crime of the highest nature. They are human creatures, the work of the same omnipotent author, equally under his care with the most polished European, perhaps being less offensive, more entitled to his favour
• They are the natural, and in the strictest sense of the word, the legal possessors of the several regions they inhabit
• No European nation has a right to occupy any part of their country or settle among them without their voluntary consent
• Conquest over such people can give no just title; because they could never be the aggressors

Journalist Paul Daley wrote in his 2018 article:

“After landing at Botany Bay Cook sailed north to what is now the tip of Queensland where, on Possession Island, at sunset on Wednesday 22 August 1770, he declared the place a British possession.

Cook named both Moreton Bay and Cape Moreton after Douglas; the translator of Cook’s diaries misspelt his title. But despite that acknowledgment, it seems the Earl was ignored.”

In 2020, we have seen significant plans to celebrate and honour Cook’s arrival and “discovery” of Australia. But I can’t help lament that back in 2013 we as a nation did nothing to mark the bicentenary of the death of Wangal man Woollarawarre Bennelong.

Bennelong, who died on January 3, 1813, was the most significant Indigenous man in early Sydney and also, in retrospect, the most misrepresented and underestimated.

Captured in November 1789 on the orders of Arthur Phillip, first governor of the convict colony of New South Wales, Bennelong soon became a valued informant and go-between. He formed an unlikely friendship with Phillip, who in 1792 took Bennelong and his young kinsman Yemmerrawanne to England.

During his stay, Bennelong lived at a number of addresses, toured key sites like St Paul’s Cathedral and the Tower of London, visited museums, attended theatre performances, enjoyed urban spas, and even took in a session of the trial of Warren Hastings at the houses of Parliament.

He was an amazing person. He learned to speak English, adapted to British customs, acted as a go-between, a diplomat and within 4 years of the First Fleet arriving, sailed across the globe to England.

He also learned to write and either wrote or dictated this letter that is celebrated as the first use of English by an Aboriginal author.

He is however remembered in our history as a flawed character, a drunk, scorned by both European and Aboriginal society.

In our textbooks, he became the stereotype of the defeated ‘native’, a victim, scarred by dispossession and cultural loss, who could not adapt to European ‘civilisation.'

I am a Bennelong fan. There are no statues of Bennelong in this country.

I’m also an avid fan of Bungaree, an Aboriginal leader from Broken Bay, north of Sydney, who adopted the role of a mediator between the English colonists and the Aboriginal people.

In mid-life, he found a patron in Governor Lachlan Macquarie, who made Bungaree 'Chief of the Broken Bay Tribe'.

Long before the image of a flamboyant joker, mimic, beggar and drunkard stamped itself on the historical memory, the adventurous young Bungaree played a key role in Australia's early coastal exploration.

So many artists were drawn to Bungaree's distinctive image that today he appears in a rich gallery of 18 portraits and many other illustrations. This was an extraordinary number as there were only two or three portraits of Governor Macquarie.

Many years ago, I caused a stir at a charity trivia night, when one history round question asked “who was the first Australian to circumnavigate Australia?”

I instructed my team on who was the correct name but when the answer was later read out as Matthew Flinders, I threw up my hand and respectfully challenged it.

Flinders, I argued was an English navigator and cartographer, who was the leader of the first circumnavigation of Australia from 1802–03.

I went on, Bungaree, the King of the Broken Bay people sailed with Flinders on the Investigator and therefore is the first Australian-born person to circumnavigate this country.

Bewildered, the judges – in fact the entire room – fell silent.

“Oh! Why don’t we just give everyone a point?” was the judges’ response.

No one in that room had heard of Bungaree, his travels, his role or his achievements.

Despite playing a key role in Australia's early coastal exploration there are more statues of Flinders’ cat Trim in this country then there are of Bungaree.

I worked almost a decade at AIATSIS, the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies in Canberra.

AIATSIS is the world’s premier institution for information and research about the cultures and lifestyles of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, past and present.

It’s a keeping place of enormous material. It's Australia’s best keep secret.

During my time at AIATSIS, we purchased this rare print of a famous painting of Derby Day at Flemington in 1886 by the Austrian born painter Carl Kahler.

Kahler is best remembered for three major works depicting Melbourne’s Flemington racecourse.

The Derby Day at Flemington is an important nineteenth century group portrait, featuring some 69 prominent and key individuals of the day including the Governor of Victoria; the Duke of Manchester; the artist; and ‘Trident’, the winner of the 1886 Victoria Racing Club Derby.

For us, the most significant part of this painting was this little figure in the forefront known as ‘Mrs Blair’s Aborigine.’

Who was he? How does he end up in the nineteenth century group portrait of the who’s who of Melbourne?

He was Lani Mulgrave Blair. He was born around 1879 in the Mulgrave River region in Far North Queensland about 20 minutes from Cairns at the foot of the Bellenden Ker Range. He was probably Yidinji or Yirrganydji.

Following a series of massacres or ‘dispersal’ of the 1880's of the Yidinji and the Yirrganydji, Lani was ‘adopted’ by was one of the most prominent medical men in Melbourne, Dr John Blair.

Dr Blair, originally from Scotland, was influential in the foundation of the Alfred Hospital.

In fact, Dr. Blair arranged with a captain of one of the inter-colonial steamers to obtain a “Queensland native” for him , so that he and his wife could raise him as a butler.

In 1880, alluvial gold had been found in the region and The Mulgrave River Goldfield was proclaimed. Steam ships made regular trips up the coast and into the Mulgrave River to drop off supplies and men seeking their fortune.

Lani was taken at two years of age, dressed in an old sack with a pannikin tied to it with a hayband and shipped down to Melbourne to work as a domestic servant.

His mother and family were killed in those dispersals.

The Blair household had a staff of Indian servants, as was the custom among people who lived in good style and could afford the luxury. One of them - the butler - remained a good and faithful servant until he died at Sorrento, where he lies buried. His name was Lani.

Reports at the time note that when Mary Blair - who couldn’t have children - saw the sad little black baby, a maternal instinct was aroused, and she was a mother to him, and he a loving son.

He was educated at All Saints' Grammar School in St Kilda.

He spent holidays and weekends with the Blairs at their house, in Sorrento, where he was habitually dressed in a sailor suit.

Dr Blair died at the age of 53 in 1887.

Lani played football, competed in bicycle races and became a splendid cricketer. After finishing school he was training to become an architect.

In 1900, after he had served two years as a pupil, one Saturday afternoon he ventured after yabbies in Albert Park lake and caught a chill, later succumbing to pneumonia. Lani was just 17.

Mary Blair lived until 1921, her final years in the Kew Hospital for the Insane.

Dr and Mrs Blair, and their adopted son Lani are buried in the Melbourne General Cemetery.

For me, the story of Lani Mulgrave Blair highlights that fairy-tale history that Bruce Pascoe wrote about in Convincing Ground.

I grew up in Cairns. We weren’t taught of the Massacres or dispersals of the Yindiji or the Yiirijangji at Mulgrave river and the history of places still called Skeleton Creek, Blackfella Creek or Skull Pocket.

We weren’t taught that Aboriginal people were captured, stolen and traded as human cargo for domestic service. Lani like Bungaree and so many others are invisible in our history.

In 1995, a national report commissioned by the Keating Government sought what further measures should be considered to address the dispossession of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people as part of its response to the 1992 High Court decision on native title.

One of the recommendations was:

"Schools have a most important role in improving relationships between indigenous and non -indigenous Australians especially in the long term. Through increasing the knowledge and understanding of school children the foundation will be set for more constructive relationships."

The Keating Government lost the next federal election and the recommendations of that report were never acted on.

But in the last decade, there has been a significant turnaround in the teaching and opportunities for all students to deepen their knowledge of Australia by engaging with the world’s oldest continuous living cultures.

We all know that today from Kindergarten to University, students are learning more about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander history that ever before. Our textbooks have made considerable progress towards presenting more inclusive and balanced narratives.

As Co-Chair of the National NAIDOC Committee, I am warmed by the growing celebrations each year for NAIDOC Week and the hunger by so many to learn more about Aboriginal cultures, our rich histories and diverse lifestyles.

Students learn of the names of those Aboriginal nations, of their sovereignty, of their achievements, of Frontier Conflict, of Invasion, of theft of land, of massacres and of the fiction of terra nullius.

The narrative is slowly changing from Aboriginal people being hunter gathers and nomads to being our first farmers, bakers, navigators, philosophers, astronomers, engineers, artists, and explorers.

A history of achievement. Of 65,000 plus years of survival, of adaptation, of research and development.

Back in 1977, NASA launched two spacecraft - Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 to study the outer Solar System.

In 2012, Voyager 1 entered "Interstellar space" after a 35-year journey, thus becoming the first human-made object to leave our solar system.

On both, is a golden record containing sounds, images and music from Earth suggested by American astronomer Carl Sagan.

On that gold disc is a Yolŋu Matha song about the ‘Morning Star’ recorded in 1962 on Milingimbi Island in Arnhem Land by Australian anthropologist Sandra Le Brun Holmes.

While recorded in 1962, it is a ceremonial song that dates back to the creation of time. We know the morning star as Venus.

For Yolŋu people, the planet Venus is Banumbirr. The Morning Star Ceremony tells how she came across the sea from the east in the Dreaming, naming and creating animals and lands as she crossed the shoreline, and continued travelling westwards across the country, leaving her legacy in many songlines.

Yolŋu people communicate with their ancestors, with the help of Banumbirr.

When Banumbirr rises a few hours before dawn, she is said to trail a faint rope behind her along which messages are sent, and which prevents her from ever moving away from the sun.

The Morning Star ceremony tells us two important things.

One is that Yolŋu people had already observed that Venus never strays far from the sun, which they explain in terms of the rope binding the two bodies together, a bond that Isaac Newton called gravity.

The other is that the Morning-Star ceremony has to be planned well in advance, since Venus rises a few hours before dawn only at certain times of the year, which vary from year to year.

So the Yolŋu people also tracked the complex motion of Venus well enough to predict when to hold the Morning Star ceremony.

The ultimate hope was that those gold records on Voyager 1 and 2 were that they could not only represent human culture, but also human cultural evolution.

Containing a map of the solar system, it was also hoped that the records would also be an invitation to anyone who found it to visit Earth.

An invitation in an Australian language that is tens of thousands of years old.

I find it mind-blowing that Venus connects the Yolŋu, James Cook and our search in the future for extra-terrestrial life across 65,000 plus years of this nation’s history.

Spanning the rise and fall of every other great civilisation on the planet.

Is that not something that all Australians should celebrate?

This is our history. Our country’s history.