Strange Endeavour

Scott Morrison has joined the list of politicians who have gotten into a muddle over Australian history.

Once upon a time, Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young conflated James Cook and Australia Day, and the Coalition’s Eric Abetz got more steamed than demonstration day in a kettle factory. “For months,” he proclaimed in that delicate quaver that sounds like a butterfly in the midst of an existential crisis, “we’ve been lectured about how Australia Day is supposedly all sorts of things, yet we now discover that the Greens don’t even know what they’re opposing … It’s easy to have a black-armband view of Australian history if you don’t even know the basic facts.” Mitch Fifield more gently opined SHY’s comments “highlight the importance of teaching and commemorating Australian history”.

Things were a bit quieter on their side when Nationals deputy leader Bridget McKenzie said on television that January 26, 1788, was “when the course of our nation changed forever, when Captain Cook stepped ashore”. Cook was killed in 1779. So yesterday, when Scott Morrison talked about funding a circumnavigation of Australia by a replica Endeavour in terms of a “re-enactment”, Abetz and Fifield probably just shrugged their shoulders, muttered “bugger it” and got on with their day. Australia was circumnavigated a couple of decades after Cook’s death by Matthew Flinders on HMS Investigator, a ship that was previously called … Xenophon. Now that’s a commemoration just waiting to happen.

Explorer Matthew Flinders.

Nick Xenophon.

From Cook to baker

“Is spending several million dollars having the replica Endeavour circumnavigate Australia a good way of commemorating Captain Cook, who didn’t do it?” a journo asked Bill Shorten. Shorten replied: “It’s a replica vessel trip around Australia. That sounds very nice in 2020-21. Good.” Meanwhile, he was the recipient of a Shorten cake, complete with a sign marking Beaconsfield, and his bulldogs Theodore and Matilda. It was the work of Rockhampton councillor Drew Wickerson, who triumphed at the Rockhampton agricultural show last year with an R2D2 cake. The Opposition Leader can’t remember if he has had drugs (Strewth, yesterday), but we can now at least say he has been well and truly baked.

The other perils of cake

In the NSW electorate of Gilmore, Grant Schultz is so cross about being circumvented as Liberal candidate in favour of Warren Mundine, he put Morrison’s name in the same sentence as Eddie Obeid’s. Ooh …

Bill Shorten in cake format; coming next, the pie version.

Meanwhile, our colleague Troy Bramston has reminded us Labor last won the seat in 1993. As Bramston recalls in his biography of Paul Keating, the then PM’s visit to the seat took place soon after John Hewson was mown down on air by Mike Willesee: “The purpose was to capitalise on Hewson’s birthday-cake blunder. “Even Marie Antoinette didn’t put GST on a cake,” Keating chortled. But the owner of the bakery, John Reminis, was not about to give Keating a free kick. With reporters in tow, the owner complained about company tax and payroll tax, which thankfully would be abolished under the Fightback policy. Keating privately referred to the owner as “the c..t from the cake shop”.

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