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ABSTRACT
Lately the two of us have been on the hunt for whitefella dreamings, although they are not hard to find. They are not the kind of Dreaming that Aboriginal people hold for Country, but something else: dreams whitefellas conjure up to make mischief, to claim power and mastery. This article traces Modern Australia back through colonial dreams—ones that were enlivened by the magic of Captain Cook and the tricks he pulled to claim possession over a third of the Australian continent for Britain’s king. It begins by considering the meanings and possibilities behind whitefella dreaming as a way of situating Cook as an ancestral spirit of Modern Australia. The article then looks at where Cook’s spirit might be hiding today, drawing on several instances of powerful mimetic surplus as counter-dreamings that break the spell of unknowing in the past and present. Finally, it searches for the magic beneath the magic of Cook’s claim of possession and offers a counter-dreaming of its own to reveal the continuation of that magic here in the present day.
Acknowledgements
For their useful suggestions, the authors wish to thank the reviewers for the Journal of Australian Studies, and the participants at Michael Taussig’s “mini aaa” gathering, High Falls, New York, 23–26 June 2023.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 William E. H. Stanner, White Man Got No Dreaming: Essays 1938–1973 (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1979), iv.
2 William E. H. Stanner, “The Dreaming,” in The Dreaming and Other Essays (Collingwood: Blank Inc. Agenda, 2009), 48.
3 Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings and Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 97.
4 Kim Mahood, “The Man in the Log,” in Wandering with Intent (Melbourne: Scribe, 2023), 109–23.
5 Mahood, “The Man in the Log,” 119.
6 Bruno Latour, On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).
7 Priya Satia, Time’s Monster: How History Makes History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020).
8 Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 79.
9 It is part of Cook’s mythologisation that Lieutenant James Cook now often becomes “Captain”. He was, in fact, a lieutenant when he arrived to Australia in 1770.
10 Chris Healy, “In the Beginning Was Captain Cook,” Australian Humanities Review 5, no. 1 (1997); see also Chris Healy, From the Ruins of Colonialism: History as Social Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
11 Healy, “In the Beginning Was Captain Cook”.
12 Healy, “In the Beginning Was Captain Cook”.
13 For a thorough examination of the Endeavour’s first days at Botany Bay, see Maria Nugent, Captain Cook Was Here (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
14 Stephen Muecke, Ancient & Modern: Time, Culture and Indigenous Philosophy (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2004), 5.
15 Katrina Schlunke, “Captain Cook Chased a Chook,” Cultural Studies Review 14, no. 1 (2008): 43.
16 Schlunke, “Captain Cook Chased a Chook,” 53.
17 Schlunke, “Captain Cook Chased a Chook,” 48.
18 Stephen Muecke, “A Touching and Contagious Captain Cook: Thinking History through Things,” Cultural Studies Review 14, no. 1 (2008): 33–42.
19 Greg Dening, Mr Bligh’s Bad Language: Passion, Power and Theatre on the Bounty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
20 As performed at the Theatre-Royal, Covent Garden (London: T. Cadell, in The Strand, 1789).
21 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 13.
22 Gordon Bennett, “The Manifest Toe,” in Gordon Bennett: Be Polite™, ed. Aileen Burns and Johan Lundh (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016), 124.
23 William E. H. Stanner, “The Boyer Lecture: After the Dreaming,” in The Dreaming and Other Essays, 138.
24 Luke Steggeman, Amnesia Road: Landscape, Violence and Memory (Sydney: NewSouth Publishing, 2021).
25 Michael Taussig, Mastery of Non-Mastery in the Age of Meltdown (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2020).
26 Michael Taussig, The Corn Wolf (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015), 8.
27 Taussig, The Corn Wolf, 10.
28 Muecke, Ancient & Modern, 11.
29 Bennett, The Manifest Toe, 124.
30 Bennett, The Manifest Toe, 82.
31 Marshall Sahlins, The New Science of the Enchanted Universe: An Anthropology of Most of Humanity, ed. Frederick B. Henry, Jr. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022), 2.
32 Muecke, Ancient & Modern, 6.
33 Michael Taussig, The Magic of the State (New York: Routledge, 1997), 3.
34 Anthony Redmond, “Captain Cook Meets General Macarthur in the Northern Kimberley: Humour and Ritual in an Indigenous Australian Life-World,” Anthropological Forum 18, no. 3 (2008): 255–70.
35 Healy, “In the Beginning Was Captain Cook”.
36 Chris Owen, “Every Mother’s Son is Guilty”: Policing the Kimberly Frontier of Western Australia 1882–1905 (Perth: University of Western Australia Press, 2016), 448.
37 Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York: Routledge, 1993).
38 Redmond, “Captain Cook Meets General Macarthur,” 261–62.
39 Deborah Bird Rose, “The Saga of Captain Cook: Morality in Aboriginal and European Law,” Australian Aboriginal Studies 2 (1984): 24–39.
40 Redmond, “Captain Cook Meets General Macarthur,” 261.
41 Paul Muldoon, “The Sovereign Exceptions: Colonisation and the Foundation of Society,” Social & Legal Studies 17, no. 1 (2008): 59–74.
42 Douglas Lind, “Doctrines of Discovery,” Washington University Jurisprudence Review 13, no. 1 (2020).
43 Lind, “Doctrines of Discovery,” 10.
44 Robert J. Miller, “Doctrine of Discovery: The International Law of Colonialism,” The Indigenous Peoples’ Journal of Law, Culture & Resistance 5, no. 1 (2019): 36.
45 Miller, “Doctrine of Discovery,” 36.
46 Lind, “Doctrines of Discovery,” 18.
47 Hugo Grotius, The Free Sea, ed. David Armitage, trans. Richard Hakluyt (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2004).
48 Alberico Gentili, De Iure Belli Libri Tres, trans. John C. Rolfe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933), 80.
49 John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, ed. C. B. Macpherson (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2010).
50 Samuel Pufendorf, The Whole Duty of Man, According to the Law of Nature, ed. Ian Hunter and David Saunders, trans. Andrew Tooke (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2003).
51 Emer de Vattel, The Law of Nations, ed. Béla Kapossy and Richard Whatmore (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2008), 128–31.
52 Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 581.
53 Haraway, “Situated Knowledges,” 581–82.
54 Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity, 13.