Paddington’s Captain Cook Hotel should restore great explorer’s name
Whatever led a Sydney hotel to drop his name, the woke left’s campaign to cancel the memory of the great James Cook shows just how ignorant they really are, writes James Morrow.
Opinion
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Sorry, Captain Cook, you’ve been cut off. You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here — at least so long as “here” is Paddington’s old Captain Cook Hotel.
The 100-plus-year-old pub had undergone a name change, dropping the “Cook”, and will henceforth be known simply as “The Captain”.
Obviously, in these highly charged times when statues are being pulled down and textbooks rewritten, the decision raised a few eyebrows.
Was this yet another example of cancel culture in action?
The pub’s owner, Robby Moroney, told reporters the decision wasn’t about politics, adding that the hotel “won’t be drawn” into the whole cancel culture controversy.
And insofar as it goes, Sydney’s drinkers will have to take the publican at his word.
But it’s hard not to suspect that, on some level, there might have been some concern that the old name was not only unfashionable, but dangerous.
Recall how just last month a Margaret River microbrewer that sold beer under the name Colonial was pulled from a chain of hipster bottle shops because, in the words of the owners, “words have power (and) ‘Colonial’ is still a problematic word that speaks to a broader history of colonialism and colonisation that has caused irreversible harm to the First Nations people in Australia and Indigenous populations around the world”.
As many noted at the time, the bottle shops’ owners haven’t given up selling alcohol, which has also caused untold harm to Indigenous populations around the world, but that’s another story.
The point is, Captain James Cook has been, with woke folk, on the nose for some time.
And it’s not hard to imagine any small businessperson deciding to get rid of the lightning rod.
In May, Victoria’s deputy chief health officer took a break from developing that state’s world-leading hotel quarantine plans — just kidding — to tweet, with regard to the pandemic: “Sudden arrival of an invader from another land, decimating populations, creating terror. Forces the population to make enormous sacrifices & completely change how they live in order to survive. COVID-19 or Cook 1770?”
A couple of weeks ago, a Greens staffer was convicted of vandalising the Captain Cook monument in Hyde Park, Sydney.
Various commemorations of the 250th anniversary of Cook’s landing this year have been met with silence, sneers, and derision — a far cry from the national celebration that gripped Australia in 1970, the bicentennial of the event.
It’s a wonder that we’re even still allowed to “have a Captain Cook” or even go home to “cook dinner”.
But all of this outrage over Cook is born of ignorance. As outrage usually is.
Yes, to the modern left, the great 18th century scientist and explorer was not a man of great achievement, but the man who paved the way for what they consider the great disaster that was the European settlement of Australia.
But no matter what tragedies may have occurred in the early life of our nation, Cook is hardly to blame.
This is not to say that efforts by the woke folk to scrub the names of early settlers like Lachlan Macquarie and Arthur Philip from the public eye are more worthwhile or legitimate. They’re not.
But if the grievance grifters are looking for someone from our early modern history to go after, Cook ain’t the guy.
If anything, Cook is exactly the sort of person the left might once have celebrated.
A working-class boy of humble origins, through his own intelligence and hard work Cook became perhaps the greatest navigator of his age.
Unlike some pirate or conquistador, the only treasure he sought was knowledge — and perhaps some scientific samples to bring back home as well.
No hard driving Captain Bligh, Cook was a shrewd leader who took care of his men — and knew what made them tick.
In one legendary account, Cook tried to get his men to eat sauerkraut to prevent scurvy. They baulked at the idea, until he made it a status symbol by only serving it in his ship’s Officers’ Mess.
Nor did he come to Australia to conquer the local population.
One famous meeting in July 1770 between Cook and the local Guugu Yimidhirr people of north Queensland led to a negotiation over the taking of turtles — and has been called by some Australia’s first act of reconciliation.
As J.C. Beaglehole, the biographer who first edited Cook’s journals noted, the great man was many things, but he was also a man of “no politics” and “no religion”.
Which may, ultimately, be more upsetting — triggering, even — to the cancellers than anything else Cook did.
For the hyper-woke left that is so keen to scrub the world of any upsetting reminders of the past and reset the clock to Year Zero, everything is political.
Think of how progressives look at even the most mundane aspects of your personal life through a political lens — who does the dishes, do you drive to work or take public transport — and you see how every action must be geared to serve their revolution.
And witness how so many of the rituals of woke culture mimic the rites of religion, from the original sin of “privilege” to the symbolic kneeling and even washing of feet we saw in the US during the George Floyd protests.
Being beyond, or above, all that — as Cook was — is perhaps the most unforgivable sin, to them, of all.
For the rest of us who are able to look at the past honestly and squarely, Cook deserves to be honoured, perhaps with a nice cold beer in the pub 250 years after he first hit the eastern seaboard.
I wonder if the Captain serves Colonial?