History wars are not the real battle

Nurturing blame and hatred for historical wrongs and complaing about Captain f***ing Cook does little to solve the real problems we face in reconciling with the first Australians.

The history wars have begun again.

The hysteria over whether or not Captain Cook actually “discovered” Australia, or whether we are a nation founded by “settlement” or “invasion”, is perhaps the dumbest debate to take place in our so-called clever country.

Even the most bong-addled arts student knows that Captain Cook was far from the first European to set foot on Australian shores, let alone the first human.

It is established fact that the Dutch were all over the place — not to mention the odd Frenchman — more than a century and a half before the great cartographer mapped the east coast. There’s a reason our continent was once called New Holland.

And of course the first Australians were here long before that — at least 40,000 years earlier, in fact — although it’s now apparently offensive to use Western constructs of time when speaking of such things.

What an absurd outrage we have backed ourselves into.

Complaining about Captain James Cook won’t address modern issues facing Indigenous Australians. (Pic: iStock)

As for James Cook, he was sent at the request of an august scientific body to track the transit of Venus, a once in two century event key to determining the nature of the solar system.

After clocking the thing in Tahiti he found out he was also meant to go on to discover the “Great Southern Land”, notwithstanding the fact a few Dutch bastards got in first.

Cook dutifully did as he was told on a small boat armed with little more than a few sailors and a botanist. The greatest conflict was a brief exchange of spears and musket fire in which a Gweagal warrior was hit in the leg. Cook tried to make contact afterwards but, somewhat unsurprisingly, failed. He soon sailed off. If it was an invasion it was a pretty pathetic one.

Nearly two decades later, after Mother England had suffered a revolution from the upstart USA and convict ships were sinking in the Thames, London decided to send us all their criminals. Eleven ships deposited this sorry cargo in Circular Quay and the story of Australia’s colonisation began.

The impact on the Indigenous people here was, clearly, enormously destructive. However that was hardly the will of Arthur Phillip, an enlightened man for his day who declared that the locals were to be treated well and that he would hang anybody who killed an Aboriginal person — even after he got speared by one.

Nor was it the plan of his wretched charges, who if lucky enough to survive the journey faced a surreally brutal exile in an unknown land. This was no victory dance.

Nonetheless, in the years since there is no question that Indigenous people were dispossessed and a great many killed, more by the diseases we brought than the bullets. Atrocities were committed by rogue colonists and cruelties inflicted by ignorant government policies. Those whose lands were taken and lives lost or ruined have every right to call it invasion.

Still, it is also true that there is probably no nation on earth that hasn’t killed or dispossessed people at some time or another. Indeed, the very country that invaded Australia had been invaded by everyone from Julius Caesar to William the Conqueror.

These matters will be debated through the ages. That is what history is and what it should be.

But nurturing blame and hatred for historical wrongs does little to solve the very real problems we face now in reconciling with the first Australians.

We argue over the long dead yet there remains the hard mortal fact that today Indigenous people still die a decade younger than the rest of us and suffer levels of abuse and a lack of education and employment that would never be tolerated in mainstream Australia.

That is the real war: The fight against poverty and disadvantage. The fight for the living.

And it’s not going to be won by complaining about Captain #@$%ing Cook.

Joe is a proud supporter of the Recognise movement and frequently blows up about disadvantage on Studio 10 from 8.30am weekdays on Channel Ten.