Federal budget 2018: opening young eyes to Captain Cook

The National Museum of Australia will use $6.58m to educate a new generation on the voyage of Captain Cook’s Endeavour

A statue of Captain Cook in Sydney’s Hyde Park. Picture: AFP

The National Museum of Australia will use a $6.58 million budget funding injection to create an exhibition and nationwide engagement program to ­educate a new generation of Australians on the world-changing voyage of Captain Cook’s Endeavour.

Museum director Mathew Trinca said the three-year funding boost would culminate in a sweeping exhibition in April 2020 ­commemorating the 250th anniversary of Cook’s journey of discovery and telling “both sides” of modern Australia’s oft-neglected foundation narrative.

“The view from the ship, the view from the shore,” Dr Trinca said, recognising the more ­nuanced and complex approach historians and academics are now bringing to the Endeavour story: seeing it through both the indigenous and non-indigenous eyes that met on the banks of Botany Bay.

“This is a story about the meeting of two cultures and our job will be to bring this story to life in ways that can inform and enthral all Australians, and especially younger Australians who may not know the story as well as some of us of older years.”

It was historians from the ­National Museum who brought the “view from the ship, view from the shore” philosophy to a five-part dual-narrative newspaper ­serial about Cook’s voyage published in The Australian last year in the wake of vandals defacing the great navigator’s statue in Hyde Park, Sydney.

“I was so encouraged by what I saw published in The Australian last year that I think the nation is ready for a story that treats both sides of this narrative honourably and equitably,” Dr Trinca said.

“One that reveals the remarkable achievements of the Cook voyage and details and honours the fact that the Aboriginal people of this coast, who saw the ship from the shore, lived in complex civilisations that have hitherto not been as strongly understood for their part of that story.

“Both sides of this story need to be told and they both need to be honoured, and that’s the work we will do.”

A major portion of the funds will go towards a community ­engagement program using the oral histories of indigenous elders to tell the Endeavour story from countless vantage points along the east coast of Australia that Cook mapped as his coal carrier slowly made its way north.

“While they all might not have had face-to-face encounters with the Endeavour, in a sense they were all touched by it, by seeing the view of that ship from their shore,” said Dr Trinca.

“It stands as a pivot point to both our indigenous and non-­indigenous stories. I think it’s a central narrative in our history.”