A History of the World in 100 Objects - Dr Neil MacGregor [225]
the strings of beads etc. we had left with the children last night were found laying in the hut this morning; probably the natives were afraid to take them away.
Perhaps they were less afraid than uninterested – or perhaps, more accurately, unwilling to engage, because to do so would have involved them in an obligation they did not want. It’s not the case that these people did not trade – they traded and exchanged goods over great distances, as the shield itself can tell us. The red mangrove wood the shield is made of comes from trees that grow about 200 miles north of Sydney, so to source the wood the people at Botany Bay must have been trading with other indigenous Australians.
With no direct encounters or exchange of gifts, Cook gave up. After a week collecting botanical specimens he sailed on up the coast. When he reached the northern tip of Australia, Cook formally declared the whole east coast a British possession.
I now once more hoisted English Colours and in the Name of His Majesty King George the Third took possession of the whole Eastern Coast by the name New South Wales … after which we fired three Volleys of small Arms which were Answerd by the like number from the Ship.
This was not Cook’s usual procedure where land was already inhabited. His normal practice was to acknowledge the rights of existing populations to the land they occupied, as for example in Hawaii. Perhaps he failed to grasp how intimately the indigenous Australians occupied and controlled their continent. We do not know what lay behind this momentous first step in expropriation. Not long after the expedition returned to England, Banks and others recommended Botany Bay as a Penal Colony to the British Parliament, so beginning the long and tragic story that for some indigenous Australians spelt the end of their communities.
The historian Maria Nugent looks at how Cook has been viewed since this first encounter:
In Australian history Cook has mainly been seen as a precursor to colonization … So he’s seen as a founding father. Which in a way cancels out the fact that there had been other European nations who had already ‘discovered’ or charted parts of Australia. But since he’s British he gets a prominent place because we became a British colony. And he held that position for quite some time; probably until the politics of the 1960s and 1970s, in which Aboriginal people vocally and prominently criticize Cook as a founding figure. And they see him as a symbol of colonization, of death and destruction … I think we’re going through a new phase now, and there’s a kind of renovation of Cook’s reputation, and he’s being seen more perhaps as a figure through which we can understand an Australian history which is about interactions between Aboriginal people and outsiders. And some people refer to this as a kind of history of encounter. But Cook is still, I think, a provocative figure in Australia, particularly for indigenous Australians.
The bark shield stands at the head of centuries of misunderstanding, deprivation and genocide. One of the big questions in Australia today remains how or indeed whether any meaningful reparation can be made. It is a process in which objects like this bark shield, held in European and Australian museums, have a small but significant part to play. Programmes of research, carried out together with the indigenous communities, are exploring surviving artefacts, recording myth and legend, skills and practice, to recover what can still be recovered of a history largely lost. This bark shield, present at the beginning of the encounter, might now play its part in a dialogue that failed to materialize 250 years ago.
90
Jade Bi
Ring of jade, from Beijing, China
AROUND 1200 BC, WITH AD 1790 INSCRIPTION
The last four chapters have been about the European Enlightenment project of discovering, mapping