A Cook’s tour of the universe, cheap at $50m

The statue of Captain James Cook stands in Sydney's Hyde Park. Picture: AFP

Last August Australians woke to the head-scratching, gut-punching news some knucklehead with Picasso ambitions had ­defaced Captain James Cook’s statue in Sydney’s Hyde Park.

By coincidence, I was then neck-deep in an epic five-part ­series on Cook’s world-changing voyage of discovery aboard the plucky coal carrier Endeavour.

The series was written to ­remind all Australians, from all sides of our many divides, exactly what that mighty explorer gave to the world and the spirit of knowledge and wonder he carried with him on to the Kurnell shores almost 250 years ago. It was written from two critical vantage points: the view from the ship and the view from the shore. European and indigenous. Black and white. Then and now.

Told right, these perspectives might tell a shared story and that story would be the story of us; a complex and challenging and ultimately hope-filled story that should never be softened or run from or sickeningly assessed by shadowed figures carrying cheap cans of spray paint.

Damn right, the Kurnell Cook infrastructure deserves an upgrade. Damn right the federal and NSW governments should throw $50 million towards visitor, trans­port, educational and commemorative upgrades on that hallowed ground.

Damn right it’s been a long time coming. And damn right governments should stick, heart and soul, to the shared history “view from the ship, view from the shore” philosophy that will underpin the project.

Then, in 2020, every last Aussie schoolkid, from Esperance to Alice Springs to Ascot, Brisbane, should beg their school to bus, fly, or Skype-link into that Kurnell site to reflect on and pay ­respect and marvel at indigenous oral histories passed down around campfires for centuries and inked diary notes written by salty, sunburnt English hands about a three-year journey into the unknown that transformed our knowledge of maths, navigation, geology, geography, botany, psychology, nutrition, med­i­cine, astro­nomy, cartography and languages. A voyage led by a humble, deep-thinking, compassionate man who found and charted half the world.

Then maybe some kid who once may have skulked through Hyde Park with a spraycan might now walk past Cook’s statue looking up at the stars.