The Magic of Captain Cook

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Indigenous critique
• whitefella dreaming
• secular magic
• cultural theory
• James Cook

Old Stanner

They say that whitefellas have no Dreaming. When W. E. H. (Bill) Stanner was out chasing Dreaming stories on Murinbata Country somewhere in the 20th century, an old man named Muta pulled him aside and told him exactly that.¹ No Dreaming, that is, of a time before time in which ancestral spirits gave form to a formless world by bringing Country into living motion as a body of relations. That body, those bodies, of Country are made of places, peoples, animals, plants, matter and energies, and they are bound together through Law, which keeps everything moving. Whitefellas, Muta reckoned, had nothing like that. They had “gone different”, down a road of their own.

All this must not have come as much of a surprise to Old Stanner, although he would carry Muta’s words around with him for a long time. He would whip them out in lectures whenever he needed to remind his audiences that to understand the Dreaming, they would have to “think black”.² His attempts to do away with “Western categories of understanding” remain incredibly thoughtful, as he sought to understand how whitefellas had “gone different”. Following the Enlightenment and the advent of modernity, they were meant to have outrun these supposedly primitive ways of thinking. Modernity, as Jane Bennett writes, was supposed to be a “clean alternative” to a “messy, primitivistic cosmology that confuses the natural with the cultural, mixes the animal with the human, mistakes the animate for the inanimate, and contaminates the moral with the prudential”.³ Asserting the triumph of Reason (along with a firm grasp on the real and objective facts) over barbarism, primitivism and superstition was a distinct effort to claim Western forms of civilisation as superior to those seen to be at earlier stages, a narrative about the order of the universe that is proving difficult to shift.

But what if in going different, as Muta may put it, whitefellas had dreamings of their own? Not Dreaming, but something else? Kim Mahood points out such possibilities when she recounts the ancient Greek myth of Dionysus, the god of grape harvest, being explained as a European tjukurpa (Dreaming) story to a group of senior Anangu women.⁴ The old ladies, concerned about drinking culture, specifically its powers of destruction, were unimpressed by the usual punitive policy talk, and the usual statistical analysis, and had asked if there was some deeper power to this drinking thing. They were impressed with the story of Dionysus, in that it spoke of a dreaming from European antiquity that was as real as their Dreamings, a resonance here in the present day that enabled them to tell a new story about a man stuck in a log, stuck in addictive behaviour. But it also shows that the dreaming of whitefellas is not emplaced in the same way as Dreaming for Country. For Mahood, the Anangu’s capacity to bring out the story about the man in the log showed they had “vast metaphoric resources in their culture waiting to be tapped”.⁵ And yet it seems the dominance of positivism in whitefella culture means it is busy pretending it does not have vast metaphoric resources. Whitefella dreams are able to wander and float through time and even re-dream themselves along the way, not only as dreams of dreams, but dreams within dreams. It is a contest of titans, rather than facts, is it not?

So, this whitefella dreaming must not have stopped when they deposed their ancient gods. When Reason is the instrument used to declare that all myth and superstition has been dispelled (or de-spelled), it speaks of just another kind of dreaming: positivism. That great anthropologist of the Moderns, Bruno Latour, speaks to this point when he shows that facts cannot be separated from their fabrication, and fact and fetish can collide to form “factish gods”.⁶ Even History, that modern way of looking back in time, takes on dreaming forms. Think of Hegel and those other European time shamans conjuring up visions of history as something carrying an internal direction and drive towards progress as if it were a law of Nature. Priya Satia’s critical interrogation of the role of historical consciousness in the British Empire shows how those dreams of progress were turned towards imperial expansion, conquest and domination.⁷

Dreaming a Modern Australia

But what about Modern Australia—might it not have given form to dreamings of its own? To be sure, they must have come from somewhere. Perhaps they are chimeras, not just dreams of dreams and dreams within dreams, but many dreams colliding into one another. With that, they may have no clear origin. Michel Foucault reminds us of the pitfalls of searching for origins, anyway. Drawing on Nietzsche, he writes that the origin comes “before the body, before the world and time; it is associated with the gods, and its story is always sung as a theogony”, imagining the birth of gods themselves back into nothingness.⁸ But even without an origin, there must be some beginning of these dreamings of Modern Australia. Some beginning, that is, when whitefella dreaming first took hold on the Australian continent.

If you look at Modern Australia’s own mythology, that beginning must be the arrival of “Captain” James Cook and the voyage of the Endeavour.⁹ As Chris Healy writes, Captain Cook has been treated as the figure standing at the start of Australia’s history: “in the beginning was Cook”, as if “Australia becomes historical only when Cook inscribes the continent within the known world of Europe”.¹⁰ Cook is a genesis figure, Healy reminds us, embodying a trinity—“discovery/possession/heritage”—in the whitefella imagination.¹¹ For many blackfellas, the First Nations people of Australia, Cook embodies the opposite: not of discovery, but of land that cannot be discovered; not of possession, but dispossession; not of a triumphalist heritage, but as a “continuing problem for white Australia, a problem of how to both acknowledge and rewrite the plot of ongoing colonial ruination”.¹²

Kurnell, the place where he first set foot onto Australia’s shores, was for a long time remembered as the birthplace of Modern Australia.¹³ As one of us has written elsewhere in a rather tongue-in-cheek way, of course Modern Australia “began with Cook”: “He was the bearer of new technology, ideas of progress and all-powerful science and reason. Modernity must have begun in Australia at this point, it must have flowed one-way from Europe, for the ‘stone-age’ inhabitants observing, laughing and resisting had nothing to offer this encounter, at least that is what the wisdom of 220 years of colonisation has determined.”¹⁴

But, of course, the only reason Cook’s arrival to Australia came to mean anything at all was in what followed. His footprints at Kurnell, modern or not, would be washed away.

If not for his claim of possession over a third of the Australian continent for Britain’s King George III, his arrival would not have counted for much, not for the Europeans or Aboriginal people. It counted little for either at the time. Europeans had been dreaming of a Great Southern Land for so long that they initially thought Cook’s attempts to find it were a failure. For the Aboriginal people who encountered him and his men, perhaps they would tell a few ghost stories of wayward spirits drifting past with strange, pointy and pointless objects. Cook would be long dead before his claim of possession meant anything, hacked to pieces for the tricks he tried to pull on the Hawaiians.

There must have come a time, more gradual than immediate, when Captain Cook’s claim of possession spelled his apotheosis in the mythology of Modern Australia and the way it dreams of its past. But that makes Cook something of an ancestral spirit. So, does that turn him into a dreaming or did he enliven one through the magic he must have summoned in claiming possession? Perhaps both. But either way, that magic must have carried through to today. But how? And where?

Katrina Schlunke reminds us of the impossibilities of pinpointing Cook, given he is a figure that works through constant “replication and chaotic proliferation”.¹⁵ Cook is a shapeshifter. Yet by opening up a new interpretative space for thinking of Cook through rhymes, Schlunke shows that we are able to access Cook in ways that interrupt the dominant historical imaginations of him while still giving us access to the real of Cook: his “chookyness”, his madness—as in the “madness that claimed a continent already occupied, the madness that teaches that still”.¹⁶ Through sound and rhyme we are able to access Cook, as if he is “right next to us, right within us as a memory; our very own Cook”.¹⁷

The other challenge is that whitefella magic is symbolic and contiguous. The obelisk at Kurnell, Cook’s landing spot, repeats the symbolic power of Cleopatra's Needle in London and other monuments as appropriations of antiquity. And it is contiguous magic, as visitors can go unerringly to the very spot itself, to touch it and be touched.¹⁸ And such monuments proliferate as Aboriginal Countries are being transformed into a Nation, as if the truth of history, on its own, were not enough. Dreaming logic tells us that. It implies that words on the page are far too reductive; history has to be performed, over and over, in multimedia fashion. In fact, as Greg Dening has demonstrated in relation to William Bligh,¹⁹ one of the best ways to make your way into history is via popular cultural consumption. Take, for example, The Death of Captain Cook; A Grand Serious-Pantomimic-Ballet, in Three Parts. As now Exhibiting in Paris with uncommon Applause, with The original French Music, New Scenery, Machinery and Other Decorations.²⁰ Produced soon after Cook's death, this performance must have been an English elegiac “corroboree”. No cold one-dimensional text here. It is full-blown ritual.

The Stuff Dreams Are Made On

Cook would never have made it to Australia without dreams, but what are they exactly? Seen as speculations, aspirations, fantasies, virtual realities, they have little to do with the oneiric. They have agency, they are real in that they have effects, but they can be made more real as they are realised, turned into physical realities—at least, that is what people tend to think, that the move is from the ephemeral, the subjective, to the objectively real. The procedural idea is that people dream of long oceanic explorations, then they put together the planning and infrastructure to actually do it, then they congratulate themselves on their achievements. But that particular conceptual pairing of subject and object (now much under the critical spotlight, along with other familiar oppositions such as nature/culture and male/female) is precisely one of the structures underpinning what we are calling whitefella dreaming.

What happens if we dissolve that opposition, the better to bring the functioning of that whitefella dreaming into focus? Suddenly the exploratory dreams of imperialism take on much more power, the driving power of human imagination. And suddenly the solidity of physical objective reality diminishes, just as Cook and the Endeavour themselves rotted away to nothing, or rather rotted away and turned into popular culture performances, memories, tourist trinkets, nation-building monuments: the stuff of dreams.

Narcissus and the Cowboy Twins

Most Australians must feel a disconnect between Australia here today and the centuries-long colonisation of the continent. The signs of the past have been reinvested with new meaning here in the present. The past, as it was when it was happening, might as well be another country. Well, that is how historical imagination would have it. History has tended to be all about distanced representation, holding the past at arm’s length—wait! further than arm’s length—especially the gory stuff or the aspects of the past that are best looked over. Besides, there is nothing colonial about Australia here in the present, is there? Nothing, that is, about the colonial dreams enlivened way back then and Australia in the here and now apart from the sunbaked monuments to Cook and other colonial bigwigs. Surely, the coast is clear, is it not? Or is that feeling of having escaped the past just a dream within a dream?

That echoes what Walter Benjamin says of collective dreams as he writes “every epoch, in fact, dreams the one to follow” and “in dreaming, precipitates its awakening”.²¹ So, one dream dreams into the other, by waking up within it. Might that mean that the first whitefella dreaming enlivened here by Cook in some way or another had the dreaming of today within it? Following Benjamin, the present is something like a dream opening up within the dreams of the past. A dreaming sequence, as yet unrecognised. If so, maybe the spirit of Cook can never be outrun and those colonial dreams of old cannot simply be undreamt. But then, is there not another dreaming where those very dreams of the past can go on, hidden and concealed in the present day?

The late artist Gordon Bennett points to this dreaming that hides away and obscures the past when he writes that Australia today is “Narcissus-like, obsessed with its self-image, gazing into the mirror surface of a still pond”.²² Such a figure is'so spellbound by its own image that it fails to reckon with its own becoming. Its eyes are peeled, but only towards the perfected image staring back at it. It cannot recognise what lies beneath that mirror surface—much less the world that it inhabits, what brought that world about and sustains it, gives it form and how all those elements must connect. There is no way to pull that spirit away from the water’s mirrored edge. This spirit is transfixed. In the oldest accounts of Narcissus, we even learn that this spirit would rather die than confront a life where it is unable to realise the fantasy of uniting with its own reflection.

The stable image of the present can be sustained only by breaking away from the past. Not just breaking from the past as it happened way back when and over there, but how the past has carried through to the present. This line of thought resonates with Stanner’s talk of the “cult of forgetfulness” that so many Australians had already joined.²³ That cult was so ready to overlook the violence of Australia’s colonisation in the past so as to curate the present, concealing wherever it could lest the past leap up out of the water and remind us that it was continuing here in the present. Better to keep it out of sight and out of mind—submerged and concealed, down in the depths.

But these days, rather than forgetting, the cult seems to be more about unknowing, that word so powerfully and evocatively brought out in Luke Steggeman’s Amnesia Road.²⁴ The cult of forgetting knows to forget, but this unknowing business never had to know in the first place. Perhaps that is where Australia’s Narcissus comes in: an amnesiac dreaming spirit for Australia’s cult of unknowing, a time ghost of the present, who unknowingly unknows the past so as to be free from it.

Such unknowing speaks of mastery—not just any mastery, but the attempted “mastery of mastery” to which Michael Taussig offers an antidote,²⁵ as unknowing snatches power away from what goes unrecognised and un-sensed by pretending it does not exist. In that way, this Australian Narcissus creature is part of a “nervously nervous Nervous System”, borrowing again from Taussig:²⁶ agitated, paranoid, obsessed by order. All this reeks of magic and trickery inside the heart of this cult of unknowing and its spirit-head. Not only the magic of unknowing, but the kind of spells that have to be cast so that unknowing and the order that accompanies it are not interfered with. This magic is apotropaic, as Taussig would describe it, “apotropaic from the ancient Greek meaning the use of magic to protect one from harmful magic”.²⁷

But within that, there is the possibility to break the spells of this unknowing with counter-magic—“counter-dreaming”, even—to cause things to erupt and destroy the stable image of the present. Such eruptions of counter-dreaming magic have the power to collapse “subject and object, observer and observed so that they mutually transform in the immanence of fields of the present”.²⁸ This is what Bennett’s artworks did. He knew that you did not have to approach the spirit to mess with the water, writing that his work was “one of the many disruptions sending ripples across the surface”.²⁹ Surely he would have sensed this in his lifetime, like the day he was racially abused in a café by a person who had just seen his painting Outsider, which shows a decapitated Aboriginal man’s body shooting a river of blood into Vincent van Gogh’s starry night.³⁰ Perhaps that shows how the spirit of the Australian Narcissus was in the minds of Australians all along.

So, Captain Cook can no longer be seen as an objective mortal figure because—through his mythologisation—he has become a real ancestral spirit able to carry on his mischief and trickery in the here and now. That is all “spirit” really means, the “more powerful” beings Marshall Sahlins calls “metapersons” that are “immanent in human existence”.³¹

This is what became of Captain Cook in Penny McDonald’s 1989 film, Too Many Captain Cooks, featuring Rembarrnga man Paddy Wambarranga, telling us with great authority that this was not the historical Captain Cook “from 200 years ago”, but “Captain Cook from a million years ago”, who brought to the Rembarrnga in Arnhem Land “axes, steel knives. They all come from Captain Cook. It’s his song, his story, his painting”. (Paddy Wambarranga is telling us this as he is recreating the song, the story and the painting in the film before our eyes.) This is the power of the real, the multiply real, Captain Cook, now with dreaming status because he is multidimensional and immortal. Not at all like the “new Captain Cooks” who “started shooting people down in Sydney. We respect only one Captain Cook. Nobody can change our culture because we have ceremony from Captain Cook”.

“And we do too,” former conservative politician Malcolm Kerr seemed to be saying when he opposed changes that were being proposed for Cook’s landing site at Kurnell. “Let’s have more credit for Cook’s achievements in a place that is the birthplace of modern Australian culture,” he said, thus evoking a modernist dreaming as unchangeable.³² Such dreamings claim to be fixed in time and fixated upon it, and perhaps in some ways that is the case. After all, there is something unchangeable about the power Cook unleashed. Some spells just cannot be broken or undone, only amplified in their magnitude: the claim of discovery and possession realised and intensified in the unfolding of time through to the here and now.

Monuments to Cook must act as sites for concentrating and legitimising this power, conductors of whitefella dreaming power. Bronze statues cast in his likeness and plaques spelling out his name are all part of what Taussig describes as “the magical harnessing of the dead for stately purposes”.³³ But surely that cannot be the limits of Cook’s magic? When Paddy Wambarranga pulls Captain Cook, the million-year-old spirit of metallurgy, into sharp contrast with the “new Captain Cooks” who began arriving from 1788, he invites us to see the difference between claiming possession and the act of taking it. Those very same distinctions were spoken of by the colonial administrators of the First Fleet who arrived to New South Wales on a colonial songline. As soon as they arrived, they quickly sneaked to shore to repeat Cook’s ceremony of possession again before letting the convicts and soldiers loose from the ships. It was only after reproducing that claim of possession that they spewed out, set up camp and went about taking it.

But something murky emerges here. The takers, those new Cooks, copied Cook’s power with their own sympathetic magic, something that both amplified and distorted what he unleashed. The violence of colonisation put to work by these new Cooks as part of dispossession and taking possession must in some way or another hold that originary magic of Captain Cook through mimesis. Just as Benjamin says, each dream awakens into the next. The dreams awoken by Cook must have carried within them the dreams of colonisation that were to follow. And within that, they must have carried the dreams of today. But what if by copying his magic, Cook’s spirit was carried throughout time as well? Which is to say, he was there on the colonial frontiers, there in the taking of possession and the dispossessing. In some way or another, his spirit must be in the taking and holding of possession today as well.

There is a junba, a dreaming-like dance, that the Ngarinyin people of Western Australia’s Kimberly region hold that reveals exactly that, joining Paddy Wambarranga’s story of new Cooks with powerful mimetic resonance. It first arrived to an Elder in a dream sometime around the end of the Second World War and has been recounted more recently by the anthropologist Anthony Redmond.³⁴ In it, a group of Ngarinyin are rudely interrupted by two ugly-looking spirits. Both spirits are indistinguishable from each other. They are painted head to toe in white ochre, wearing cowboy hats bent up into the tricorn of old British naval officers. Their bellies are bloated and engorged, and they hobble into the dance ground on crooked legs waving rifle-shaped sticks in the air.

These cowboy twins are Modern Australia’s very own Romulus and Remus, who announce themselves in spews of thunder:

“Oye, listen up everyone! I’m Captain Cook,” we could imagine one growls, as he tips his hat.

“Aye, he’s Captain Cook and, me, I’m General Macarthur! We’re the new bosses of this place now!” snarls the other.

Hey, look! We are dreaming our own dream into this dream-like dance.

No sooner, they start pointing those rifles at the Ngarinyin, taking each of them captive by chaining them around the neck, marching them around and around the dance ground en route to a colonial prison.

Of course Cook and Macarthur may not have actually come and colonised Australia, at least that is not what History tells us. If they did, Macarthur would have been a bit late to the party, turning up to Australia only in the Second World War when he was spearheading the United States military campaign in the Pacific. Cook, too, was dead long before colonisation began, although many Australians hold on to a dreaming that he was there, waving in the First Fleet, guiding them to the promised land—Moses of the Antipodes.

Nah, this junba holds time differently, not like History. It is not a story isolated to a particular time, and instead summons powerful mimetic potential that relays the story of colonisation as it played out across centuries and generations. This is common to many Aboriginal histories of Cook, as Healy points out, because they “do not rely on the convention that history should imitate ‘the historical process’, but perform histories in ways that foreground social memory as appropriations of the past in the present”.³⁵ These histories go beyond history, in that sense.

Take the “neck chain”, for instance. This was a technique used across Australia, particularly in the northern half of the continent, from the early 19th century until the middle of the 20th century. At the time this junba was first dreamed into existence, police in the northwest of Australia were still using neck chains on Aboriginal people—a practice that continued until at least 1956, according to Chris Owen.³⁶ The neck chain is not a contraption isolated to a particular time and place, but a marker of dispossession carrying through to the here and now.

As Taussig reminds us, when mimesis spills over into alterity, something more meaningful than claims about “what really happened” and “where and when” can emerge.³⁷ In his analysis of the junba, Redmond points to the monstrous form of these spirits as a way of communicating their immorality and perverse sexual desire.³⁸ There is also immortality in the Saga of Captain Cook as retold by Hobbles Danaiyarri to Deborah Bird Rose, where all European law imposed on Australia and blackfellas is a living Captain Cook at work, making mischief.³⁹ Their crooked legs are suggestive of being born from an incestuous union, Redmond tells us, pointing out it is a common trope in dance and mimicry among some Aboriginal groups in the north of Australia.⁴⁰ Their engorged bellies speak to this monstrosity as well, relaying an ambiguous and yet unquenchable desire, which becomes clear only as the twins declare themselves the bosses of the country and then go about taking possession and imposing their authority and control.

But these spirits, twins though they may be, were not born at the same time. When the junba first emerged, Cook and Macarthur were standing at opposite ends of the whitefella history of Modern Australia. Cook was there at its supposed beginnings, to be sure, at Kurnell and on Possession Island. Macarthur, on the other hand, was running the United States war machine from his military bases in Brisbane, both at The University of Queensland and in town. Just like Cook, Macarthur was thrust into a godlike status and at various times called “Australia’s saviour”. So, perhaps where Cook marks a beginning in whitefella history on the continent, Macarthur embodies the present, even now that the junba itself is decades old.

With that mimetic manoeuvre, the beginning (Cook) and present (Macarthur) are shown to mirror each other. These incestuous twins, born of different times, must be part of the same dreaming sequence, one that has looped back in on itself so many times—spinning out of control—as it amplifies and distorts that it has been rendered in more and more monstrous forms. Yet Cook and Macarthur hold such powerful symmetry in appearance and action that they can be distinguished from each other only by names. As the junba goes on, we might even lose track of who is who, which causes things to erupt.

All of a sudden, we see that both the past and present derive their authority through each other. The beginning reinforces the present, in that Cook’s arrival and claim of possession strengthens possession in the present and the way the colonial dream enlivened by Cook feeds into the dreamings of now. The present day, similarly, realises its power through the beginning. But then both beginning and present are united through the centuries-long colonisation running in between. It is the dreaming sequence running in between that unites them, gives them power.

It All Began with a Trick

This dreaming sequence may take Cook’s arrival and claims of possession as its beginnings, but there must be magic beneath Cook’s magic. How else could he show up and claim one-third of an entire continent already occupied by hundreds of nations whose shared Dreaming had given it form? The trick he seems to have used was to say the continent was empty, as in unoccupied or without settlement. That legal fiction of terra nullius (“no one’s land” or “empty land”) comes to mind, but of course it was applied to Australia only later, as Paul Muldoon shows.⁴¹ But still, Cook did not have to mutter or chant those words to draw out their magic. Nor did he pull that magic from thin air. Whitefella magic tricks of discovery had a long historical unfolding, running back thousands of years. It had dreamings of its own, such that the magic of terra nullius was already there with Cook, even if it he did not call out to it by name.

This terra nullius dreaming has been traced back to Roman law and its legal principle of res nullius or “no one’s thing”, where discovering something unowned allowed the discoverer to claim it.⁴² This was a “finders keepers, losers weepers” type of deal. But over the centuries, doctrines of discovery kept gathering power and momentum, particularly after European Crusades on the Holy Land in 1096–1271. In the 12th century, King Henry II of England was looking to invade Ireland and went seeking the permission of Pope Adrian IV to do so. The Pope responded by dreaming up terra infidelibus (“land of infidels”), allowing the lands of non-Christian peoples to be “discovered” and taken so as to fulfil the expansionist desires of Christian Empires.⁴³ Through the 15th century, some more cheeky popes continued to dream up papal magic for the discovery and conquest of peoples and lands, starting with Spain and Portugal bickering about who could claim the Canary Islands in the 1430s.⁴⁴ Within two decades, Pope Nicholas V told Portugal’s King, Alfonso V, that he could “invade, search out, capture, and subjugate” any “unbelievers and enemies of Christ wherever they may be” and take all their land and property as well.⁴⁵

However, holes began to appear in this papal magic once Spain and Portugal tried to use it to split the “New World”, the Americas, in half.⁴⁶ The magic would not stick, not in the eyes of other European powers at that time. So, Spain gathered together a group of jurists and philosophers, asking them to conjure up an alternative possessive power, leading Francisco de Vitoria to take the Romans' idea of res nullius and think of it in terms of discovering unoccupied or deserted land: terra nullius. But de Vitoria knew this idea would not hold up for Spain and Portugal. Later, Hugo Grotius thought so as well.⁴⁷

Then along came Alberico Gentili, saying that the “seizure of vacant places” was a “law of nature” and what counts as being “vacant” is open to interpretation (wherever Indigenous peoples were not standing at the time, perhaps).⁴⁸ Then there was John Locke, with his ideas that possession of land came from labouring on the soil,⁴⁹ further mixing together the European concoction of civilisation, settlement and cultivation. Around the same time, Samuel von Pufendorf writes that what counts in discovering and claiming territories is the intention to cultivate and occupy it along with the production of boundaries.⁵⁰ Then, only decades before Cook scaled the hill at Possession Island, Emer de Vattel published the Law of Nations, in which he writes that “unsettled habitation in those immense regions” of the world “cannot be counted as true and legal possession”.⁵¹ More than that, he reckons, nations have no right to take possession of the land of other nations, but they have an obligation to take possession of uncultivated land or even land that is not cultivated up to the standard that Europeans could achieve.

Gradually, over centuries—millennia even—a vast concoction of powers, meanings and symbols coalesced in the dreaming of terra nullius, with one dream bleeding into the next until its magic was finally put to use by Cook as he cast his spell over the Australian continent. This! This is the magic beneath Cook’s magic! Well, not quite. The magic is there, but how did he pull it off?

When Cook and his men arrived at Possession Island in August of 1770, they had everything ready for conjuring up his powerful spell of possession. His journal describes them rowing to shore from the Endeavour as the sun was almost setting over the straits. They then scaled a small hill on the island, allowing them to look back over the mainland. Cook read aloud a little proclamation, saying that everything east of the 38th degree parallel was now claimed by the British Crown. He christened this new territory “New South Wales” and with that, soldiers shot muskets in the air. After that, Cook tells us, they returned to the Endeavour and set sail for Batavia. Well, there does not seem to be anything remarkably magical about all that. Oh, wait! They shot the sky a few more times once they were back on the ship.

There are a few things missing from Cook’s recollection of his possessive ritual. There was his journal, to be sure, which he used to summon up the European concepts of civilisation and savagery, leaning heavily into ideas about material possessions, settlement and the cultivation of land and progress. The second was the map he and his men put together as they snaked their way up the eastern coast of Australia.

The map must have acted as an object of potent mimetic potential. It gave Cook the power to perform what Donna Haraway calls the “god trick”, that ability to “see everything from nowhere”, not just as “myth” but as “ordinary practice”.⁵² The map is just another visualising technology, which Haraway tells us “fucks the world to make techno-monsters”—monsters whose devouring vision dreams itself as all-consuming.⁵³ The map and the continent become mimetically intertwined, as if the map itself is an object that devours the world it represents so as to become it. So, the map is a conduit of terra nullius dreaming power. To draw a line down the body of the map—approximating the 38th parallel (another line beyond the realm of experience)—the map is supposed to cut a line down the body of Australia as well.

But its magic did not end there. As Taussig tells us, the magic of mimesis comes not only through the existence of an artefact, but its making.⁵⁴ As Cook drew the map—line by line, squiggle by squiggle—he was gradually amassing potent mimetic potential over the continent. So, too, with his creation of hundreds of place names along the way, claiming—as in dreaming—to invest possessive magic across the landscapes. There is a link there, between story and possession. Remember “Botany Bay”?

Once completed, Cook’s map, imitating the coastline by scribbling lines on paper, rendered the body of Australia visible only by its margins. The interior of Cook’s map was no doubt empty, devoid of the First Nations people he encountered along the way, ignorant of Country and Dreaming power. Making the interior of the map empty or emptyish, aside from the place names and landmarks that he chose to inscribe, allowed Cook to dream up an empty continent with the god-trick of the map. All that was left to do on Possession Island was to complete the loop and draw a line between north and south so as to create a territory. This demarcating of a border was just as von Pufendorf prescribed a century earlier, as he invested the doctrine of discovery with new power. Of course the interior space of this map was an empty and featureless space, because Cook had never stepped far enough into the interior to see it.

Conclusion

By making “Captain Cook” the focus of an Indigenous critique, recalling the significant place he has come to occupy in Indigenous Australian dreamings, we have sought to displace his historical status as the figure at the origin of what came to be dreamt up as “Modern Australia”. That objective process of history writing quite rightly positions him at the beginning of chapter one of colonial history writing, as if he disappeared after that. But our thinking seeks to recognise his continued presence, his immortality as it were, the repercussions of his power. Each chapter of a new, non-teleological writing of history would see him cropping up in every chapter, each time with a new battle on his hands.

This is the Captain Cook who was discovered, invented and even celebrated by Paddy Wambarranga, Hobbles Danaiyarri and the Ngarinyin songmen. They recognised that his power had nothing to do with being circumscribed by time, and that there must have been some mischievous magic in the capacity to take possession of a whole Country.

And indeed there was, as we began to identify some of the tricks performed by what whitefellas like to call Enlightenment reason: making whole populations disappear with a Latin phrase; taking possession with a colourful flag-raising; re-enacting dreams of origin; denying that there was any magic involved because that’s how whitefellas distinguish their reason, from that of the others, in the first place.

If there’s anything real about whitefella dreamings, it is in its denials, in the assertion of objectivity and smooth technological efficiency, adding up to an illusion of “being modern” and leaving all that superstitious stuff “behind”, where it must remain as a historical curiosity along with the “primitives” it is inevitably displacing. And those denials serve another purpose (one we did not bring to the fore because we were interested to follow the alternative logics of mentors such as Wambarranga and Danaiyarri), which is to mask the foundational violence that happened when state sovereignty was brutally enforced in these Aboriginal Countries. Why did those old folk not talk of whitefella dreamings in those terms, concentrating instead on the magical power of Captain Cook? Could it be because the very idea of “foundation” is flimsy, merely temporal, failing to capture the grip of powers in ongoing conflict, that perennial struggle over that place called “Australia”?

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.