By Katrina Schlunke
UTS Speaks, University Hall, UTS
15 November 2007

Thank you Rick for your kind introduction, for taking the time in what is one of the very busiest times in the research calendar and more generally sustaining a sense of hope and expansion about research within the faculty.

So let us start our stop-start Cooks tour that will consider banal evil, childhood comfort, replication, possession, islands, monuments and trees.

Ordinary Evil

We are meeting and talking on Indigenous land the title of which has never been relinquished nor legally forfeited. More particularly when we are thinking about the rethinking and reimagining of Cook mythology we need to keep in mind the continuing enactments of Cook that quite precisely silence the very particular histories of the Eora and Cadigal peoples of this extended area. And quite deliberately foster a national dream at the ongoing expense of space to articulate an Eora reality. The most recent of these was in the second episode of a series called Captain Cook: Obsession and Discovery. Cooks landing at Botany Bay was rendered in the following way by the Film Australia financed series on 'our' ABC

Show Excerpt (showing Cook landing with voice over of unable to meet anyone and Cook picking up distressed brown baby)

The landing of Cook at Botany Bay was recorded in this way in Cook's Journal:

...They now waved to us and I was willing to interpret it as an invitation; but upon our putting the boat in they came again to oppose us. One appeared to be a youth about nineteen or twenty, and the other a man of middle age: as I had now no other resource I fired a musquet between them. Upon the report, the youngest dropped a bundle of lances upon the rock but recollecting himself in an instant he snatched them up gain with great haste: a stone was then thrown at us, upon which I ordered a musquet to be fired with small shot, which struck the eldest upon the legs, and he immediately ran to one of the houses, which was distant about an hundred yards: I now hoped that our contest was over, and we immediately landed; but we had scarcely left the boat when he returned, and we then perceived that he had left the rock only to fetch a shield or target for his defence. As soon as he came up, he threw a lance at us, and his comrade another; they fell where we stood thickest, but happily hurt nobody. A third musquet with small shot was then fired at them, upon which one of them threw another lance, and both immediately ran away... i

So when I say I would like to acknowledge the Indigenous owners of this land I would also like to acknowledge how persistently and carefully they are rendered absent, rendered as 'running away' turned in a swing of gushing red hair and the snip of an editors cut into a sweet brown abandoned baby ready for Cook to hoist on his shoulder and save. This puzzling film shot seemingly a depiction of not only the prizes of so called exploration but the Stolen Generation to come. A needy baby replacing the two men, one of which after being shot returns with a shield that is on display, fully acknowledged in the British Museum. (Slide 1 -Shield)

Surely that Eora man could become the kind of foundational hero every nation seemingly craves (Slide 2-Warriors). But here and now we never see Cook firing, never see the Eora defending on a weekly basis, on Sunday night, on our ABC. So this all too quiet act of acknowledging the Eora and Cadigal peoples is a perpetual calling up of the gap between sovereignty and occupation, seeing and knowing.

Replication

Many of you may already be aware of the multiple Cook sagas that come from northern and central Australia via their tellers, Paddy Wainburranga, Joli Laiwonga Hobbles Danaiyairi and others on behalf of the Rembarrgna, Ngalkgun and Yarralin peoples through the recordings and dissemination by Chips Mackinolty, Penny Macdonald and Deborah Bird-Rose. These different stories tell many nuanced accounts of Cook but most have some idea of two laws: Cook's law; oppressive, unprincipled and immoral and the true or Dreaming law that is based upon and assumes Indigenous ownership of land. In the telling of these sagas numerous white figures; missionaries, pastoralists, Protection Officers appear as Cook figures, continuing his law. In this sense Cook is not understood to be dead but very much alive in the form of all his followers who continue to 'make themselves strong'ii through the exploitation of Indigenous labour, land, minerals and knowledge. This sense of Cook as a process of perpetual reproduction without difference obviously differs to so many historical efforts to freeze Cook in a particular moment, to insist he is dead when he continues in Australia to be highly productive, very much alive.

Perhaps the best known of the Cook sagas is that told by Paddy Wainburranga and Joli Laiwonga which was titled by Chips Mackinolty as 'Too Many Captain Cooks'. This saga begins with the good Cook from Mosquito Island up near New Guinea who travels all about the place with his two wives and who knew not to interfere. He came to Sydney Harbour to build his boat and he made Sydney Harbour but not Sydney Harbour Bridge just a 'blackfella bridge out of planks first time'. The devil lived on the other side of the Harbour and was able to start seducing Cooks two wives because Cook was always working. The devil who was also Satan got the two wives to help hide him so he could kill Cook and take the wives away. Cook and Satan eventually fight hand to hand and Cook kills the devil and throws him into a hole, the hole we now know as the Cahill Expressway. That was temptation defeated. Cook then went back to Mosquito Island but something happened and Cook was speared by his relations so he came back down to Sydney Harbour where he died of his wounds and was buried on the island which we know here as Garden Island. (Slide 3 Garden Island ) After this old Captain Cook came all the new Captain Cooks. As Wainburranga puts it:

'They just went after the women. All the New Captain Cooks fought the people. They shot people. The New Captain Cook people, not old Captain Cook. He's dead. He didn't interfere and make a war. That last war and the second war.
They fought us. And then they made a new thing called 'welfare'...
They wanted to take all Australia.
They wanted it, they wanted the whole lot of this country. All the new people wanted anything they could get. They could marry black women or white women.
They could shoot people.
New Captain Cook mob!"

You hear in Paddy Wainburranga's acute legal diagnosis, his epic poem, the expansive scale of the destruction that was wrought. This is a myth of good and bad Cooks where the bad Cooks are still on the loose only lessened by each act of restoring culture. In Vanessa Collridge's ABC myth we see a good and bad Cook that are the one person, obsession and discovery as if they are opposite parts of a person and not a linked process that continues. The great power of Wainburranga's story is that he articulates the possessive force of the new Cooks. A force that maps and names but also shoots and legalises –literally transforming through a possessive rite one thing into another – the east coast of New Holland into Australia, a silencing into a discovery, the presence of people into an absence and so on – magic, rituals of transformation and giving in to temptation through possession.

Comfort

Last night I went to the theatre, the Belvoir to see Schuberts Toy Symphony and in it the main character Roland, is suffering, perhaps some lifelong distress about what is real and what is writing and he is asked by his therapist to remember a moment when he was perfectly comfortable, joyful, open. He remembers a scene (which comes to life on the stage) from his primary school when his richly voiced second? third grade teacher stands behind the earliest version of the overhead projector and shows slides of the history of Como which includes Captain Cook who after observing the transit of Venus came to explore the east coast thus paving the way for the founder of Como. The palpable pleasure the small boy feels in the semi dark with the soothing rattle of plastic overheads and his perfectly reliable primary school teacher recounting again how his world has come into being. And we know it is an again because the boy keeps bursting across her listing, possessed by knowledge: And Cook went to observe the TRANSIT OF VENUS, and he came on to BOTANY BAY, BOTANY BAY transit and the teacher goes on hearing his excitement, knowing he knows but quietly proceeding, repeating, comforting him with Cook.

Possession

In Australia possession as named by Cook is marked by an island; Possession Island. (Slide 4 Possession Island) This is the island where Cook wrote:

Notwithstand (this last bit also crossed out) I had in the Name of his Majesty taken posession of several places upon this coast I now once more hoisted English Coulers and in the Name of His Majesty King George the Third took posession of the whole Eastern Coast from the above Latitude down to this place by the Name of (New Whales New Wales crossed out) New South ^Wales together with all the Bays, Harbours Rivers and Islands situate upon the same said coast after which we fired three Volleys of small Arms which were Answerd by the like number by from the Ship iii (Slide 5 -tiny island)

Everything is claimed even the Harbours like Sydney that he hasn't seen and the rivers and all the bays and all the islands. There is a pre-echo Of Wainburranga's rhetoric here. Taking women, marrying anyone, shooting, wanting anything they could get, rivers, bays, harbours, islands. Was Cook comforted by these lists?

This tiny island, just off the tip of Cape York bears a huge representational burden. The seeming irony of an island as Carter pursues (Slide 6 -Italics) and displays with his italics. An island symbolically securing a whole coast and so eventually a continent.iv An island!

Possession seems never to have been an easy word. It seems always to have held within itself ideas of violence, settlement and transfiguration. Cook 'possessed' various islands and 'situations' in his voyages in the name of the King but the most usual use of the word in his journal was to designate items of property. These items of property in turn often appeared in relation to stories of finding bits and pieces from his ship or crew in the hands of Indigenous peoples. That is, Cook bought not only possession but also theft for how else could he insist that property existed unless it has the possibility of being given to, sold or taken by others?

But possession is not just property but the sensibility of duration. It is the triumph of domination and the weariness of control. It is the love rites of 'take large possession of my lab'ring breast (1753,H.. Jones OED) and the operations of Satan or other demons and spirits. Everywhere in possession is the unassailable declaration and its diminishment. This word is then taken to island. Possession Island. (Slide 7) Island with its seeming isolation, island in its separation from land by sea. But islands are also doubled movements. As Deleuze reminds us 'geographers say there are two kinds of islands'. These two kinds of island are the continental and the oceanic. The oceanic form from coral reefs and underwater eruptions. The continental ' are separated from a continent, born of disarticulation, erosion, fracture; they survive the absorption of what once contained them' (p.9 Deleuze). Possession Island is continental. The oceanic island reminds us that the earth is till there, alive active, erupting, the continental island reminds us that 'the sea is on top of the earth'. 'Humans cannot live, nor live in security, unless they assume that the active struggle between earth and water is over, or at least contained'. So 'that an island is deserted, Deleuze argues, must appear philosophically normal to us'. (p. 9)v Islands should deter people.

To come onto Possession island (Slide 8) is to find what white possession has done in its writing over of its earlier namings as Bedanug and Tuidin. Here there is active deterrence. No shooting, no dogs, no fires -watch out for crocodiles. Each warning insisting that the island be uninhabitable. Without a gun no larger mammals or reptiles to eat, without a dog no friend to please, without a fire no cooking of food and no way of warning the crocodiles to stay away. So no traditional practices are to occur here, no official reconnection of this island with its neighbours and peoples. But these signs are also a warning to the white escapee for they forbid exactly the things Robinson Crusoe had, dog (remember he even had cats), guns and fire. That bourgeois Crusoe, still needing his wrecked ship as a bank of tools to render his island habitable, that Crusoe as Deleuze notes who should have been eaten by Friday. These signs insist that officially only the perpetual re-enactment of Cook's path will be allowed. Officially we must only come across for a moment, confirm where we are by looking and re-confirm the islands importance in relation to Cook's navigational trajectory, to the mainland, to the whole of Australia, right to this very point beyond the tip - as possessed. And these re-enactments do occur in the helicopter flights from Horn Island (Slide 9) that deliver people to the tip of Cape York, land them there to enable them to add one more stone to the cairn and on the way back buzz the Cook monument - that thing beyond all land, the possessor of Possession Island. But what is official up here? What vehicle could stop any night time camp fires when the tide has gone right out and the rocks ring us? Who will know if a turtle is taken or crab collected or oysters eaten? (Slide 10) In this place local knowledge makes ordinary all those European fantasies of the self producing island cornucopia.

What does it mean that this island has a mainland. continental name Bedang and an oceanic or island name Tuidin? What kind of name does that make Possession? As Moreton-robinson puts it so succinctly in her introduction to 'The House that Jack Built: Britishness and White Possession' -the right to take possession was embedded in British and international common law and rationalised through a discourse of civilisation that supported war, physical occupation and the will and desire to possess. Underpinning property rights, possession entails values, beliefs, norms and social conventions, as well as legal protection, as it operates ideologically, discursively and materially. Property rights are derived from the Crown which in the form of the nations-state holds possession (p.21)

But the kind of white possessiveness that Moreton-Robinson sees people being encouraged to invest in is up here ambiguous at best. To be white on Possession Island would be to starve. To constantly be calling up the importance of Cook in this place would put you against the reality of an almost complete area of native title. To think of ideas of discovery as foundational would be to deny not only what you would see day after day but what you would feel as a minority group, as 'a European' here. Non-Indigenous Australians practice possession - we walk, talk, buy and sell within possession. But the actual naming of an island, naming something that is meant to be natural, intrinsic - throws too sharply into relief its shadow. It reminds us how far from Perth, from Melbourne from here, from there was Cook's path. How is this small island all of Australia?

This island I might be the real. It might be that, that cannot be seen except in difficult, fraught glimpses. That which through its very absence confirms 'our' reality of possession, confirms the need for our daily practices of reclaiming and reknowing in the first instance Indigenous land and in the second all land. Diurnally confirming the domination of the human over plant, animal, sea and sky. This island then a simultaneous confirmation and refusal of confirmation that drives the need to constantly perform possession. The proof of our claim that cannot appear. Not on our daily national weather maps nor most maps of Australia - a reality beyond navigation. A naming that upsets mythic white ownership.

Going to the Island

Possession Island began on Horn Island at 2am when Susan turned the light on to check the time, then at 3:40 am when I woke for no reason. Perhaps it was the drone of the airconditioner keeping us awake - in the middle of winter we were still needing air conditioning like the thin skinned southerners we are. And then at 5am we woke up properly to be at breakfast as we had been told by 6am. But at 6am everything in the dining/bar area was in the murky greyness of shutness except for two casually business suited men in Aquaculture, one from Thailand, one from Canberra who were waiting with their rollway bags and mobile phones for something to happen. We were meant to leave at 6:45 and at 6:30 a not very communicative women came out and began laying out breakfast things. We rush through our Just Right and Muslei and run for the mini bus worried about missing it. The time arranged to meet Tony at the wharf was 7 am to catch the tides. We have no idea where the wharf is, having arrived late the night before and time is ticking as we wait for the bus to go. It is 6:45 and suddenly the bus IS going. The driver, the same quiet woman who laid breakfast and so we scramble on and travel exactly two minutes around the corner to the wharf. (Slide 11) No one had suggested we could have walked. It is not assumed you would want to in the heat and perhaps they are right. Even in drizzle we are hot. At the wharf we wait for a while always half worried we have somehow managed to miss our boat. The boats at the wharf were pink and purple and the surrounding sea was aqua blue even as the clouds came over. (Slide 12) We re-read the crocodile warnings.

We know where the island is and we have Tony Tisaye to take us in his fast boat with a promise of food, swags and tents for the rain. The we is my partner Susan and I. Susan is important here in the western folklore of islands, Suzanne and the Pacific, the Lovely Susan of Palm Island Adventure. So we know where we are going but we do not know when or how. When Tony comes Susan worries about the boat and the supplies. It seems small and un-full for all that we might need for our single night on the island. And the sea from inside the boat looks big. Will we be all right? There are more squalls moving in and it is darker for a moment then before. Tony does the mock exaggeration - hey we get lost we'll be crocodile food and his quick punch line - 'only joking'. We get in the boat. (Slide 13)

To approach the island from the sea is to move toward a rounded shape, the pleasure of that approach, of coming across rather than into something and landing clumsily into sand and walking up upon a beach. (Slide 14) The island as a whole island has been in my mind for a long time and when we arrive it takes up a wholly sensational existence. It refuses writing and description; never becoming small enough in memory to be seen and recorded with the words that would vivify it. It remains intensely, sensorally concrete. I can't make up an idea of this place that can fit in my forehead which is how Scarry says we remember.

Even now I can't remember Possession Island as an island. It refuses to become memory as one would usually understand it - as a set of brief vivid snapshots, momentary experiences, a single flower, a patch of rock. It is instead a presence. It is connected to but not the same as standing at one end of the long, long paddock of the not quite ruins of Birkenau and feeling most profoundly things fall into place. This island too stays. It does not resolve itself into piecemeal remembrance but like a wide, wide angle shot remains completely across the mind. On it Australia falls into place. Here national possession seems not merely incommensurate with lived Indigenous sovereignty but ludicrous. The journey into the heart of whiteness finds not an ultimate barrier, the original fence to domesticate the wild but a small island, a National Park: no dogs, no guns, no fires, watch out for crocodiles - and the other mark of national possession - the Cook monument. (Slide 15)

The Monument

The monument depends on text. (Slide 16). Physically it looks faintly military - its squat, box cement shape a mixture between a military flag base and a gun pill box. It feels defensive. Its peeled white paint and rusted front pole suggests an uncared for public convenience. But the first written plaque is clear and clean. The words well spaced, eyes to front, staring into the uncaring sea: 'Lieutenant James Cook RN of the Endeavour landed on this island which he named Possession Island and in the name of his Majesty King George the Third, took possession of the whole eastern coast of Australia from the latitude 38 degrees south to this place'. This place. On the side is a more detailed set of particular acknowledgements. The ships crew who built it, the bicentenary committee who funded it, the historical society that initiated it and the bishop who blessed it. And here we learn that this is also a monument to the defacement of the first. The 'Torres Strait Historical Society initiated reconstruction of this monument after the original cairn, erected by the federal government earlier this century was vandalised'. Fiona Nicoll has already written about the ways in which Indigenous Sovereignty works as a 'public secret' using Taussig's ideas on defacement. The public secret which can be defined as 'that which is generally known but cannot be articulated' (Taussig 5-8) and he asks the question 'Then what happens to the inspired act of defacement? Does it destroy the secret or further enhance it?' His example was the naked statue of the Queen and Prince Phillip that was then beheaded, the double defacement he believes leading to a reinforcement of the public secret of monarchial power in Australia. But what of this example? A defacement officially recognised in a plaque recording a monuments (now only ever partial) restoration, never replication? Is this the historical continua to the original opposition to Cook at Botany Bay? Is it in this small sentence, in small writing on the side of this raggedy monument that Indigenous Sovereignty is quietly named aloud? Reconstructed, monument, earlier, vandalised. The monument looks toward the north east and so looks toward the island of Mer. Eddy Mabo's Mer. Mer, one of the most beautiful islands we are told, rich and bountiful - 'it makes you happy just to go there'.

Trees

I went to Possession Island to find a tree that I knew could not be there. (Slide 17) This is the tree painted by Gillfillen and turned to print by Calvert. It is the originary, possessorary tree; shading the conquerors, providing their food and extending its limbs over the coming domain of the British in Australia. The great Australian imginary. This print is called in part 'Taking possession of the Australian continent'. This, as you now know was meant to take place on Possession Island.

My failure to make memory of this island is connected perhaps to a failure to imagine. Elaine Scarry makes a lovely case for the ways in which imagination and the flower are interrelated. Her flowers are soft, near translucent, filmy - not the solid felt of the Australian flannel flower or the engaging force of the banksia -but a specific geographical imagining that arises from the cool climate, wet schlerophyll in the relatively new and mud based soil of her country. Those flowers are the right size to fit in our foreheads, the right softness, the right innocence of culture. But how do we imagine here then? All of us who have grown up with the solidly defined, baroque curlicles of the banksia and the flashing metallic sheen of the eucalypt leaf that have left their mark on us? How do we describe the force of this imagining we have learnt to call nature but is the worked upon, storied up place of Indigenous occupation?

I found my tree. (Slide 18) Not a tree of possession but a mangrove tree, rhizomorpha stylosa. You know it by its exposed roots (pneumatophores) which come up for oxygen where there is none in the muddy, sandy tidal flat. Rhizomorpha literally the transmitter, the bearer of the root, the rhizomes that move horizontally. Roots that don't simply dig down and hold on but take up the sea, shed the salt and breathe. The roots holding the sediment that nurtures crabs and molluscs, enemy and friend alike and stabilise the wind blown side of the island. It is not really in opposition to anything. It draws humans to it for what further food it might support, to take the crabs that destroy its seedlings and the bark that is used for ulcers and yaws. Some say these trees began up here. For Scarry 'The felt experience of imagining, the interior brushing of one image against another, is the way it feels when two petals touch one and other' (p.268) But why not here another experience of imagining? The natural history of Captain Cook. The brushing of water and root, wind and sand, polystyrene and human hand? The moments of potential place within the mangrove tree, reaching up for air out of possession? Another kind of imaginary. A real myth.

Deleuze imagined some extraordinary people who might be able to rival the original movement of the island drifting AND erupting, continuity AND invention. But what are these movements? Everyone in these straits it seems fishes. There's always a boat or a wharf or a movement. People ride across water to arrive at other water, from one island to a temporary, boat limited, settlement on the surface. And the thin lines off wharves, rocky outcrops and anything left over that sticks into the sea. Anywhere where the ocean is close enough to practice an almost islandness. No one here needs the security of the mainland that Deleuze presumes, the mainlands too far from the fish.

i Extracted from Cook's original journal per National Library on line, (29th April 1770) http://nla.gov.au/nla.cs-ss-jrnl-cook-17700429

ii Bird Rose, Deborah (1984) The saga of captain Cook:Morality in Aboriginal and European Law, Australian Aboriginal Studies, Number 2, p.35

iii Extracted from Cook's original journal per National Library on line, August 22nd (1770) http://nla.gov.au/nla.cs-ss-jrnl-cook-17700429

iv Paul Carter, Road to Botany Bay v Gilles Deleuze, 'Desert Islands' in Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953-1974, Semiotext(e), Los Angeles, 2004, p.9