In 1770, Lieutenant James Cook made the first of three voyages to the Pacific. Appearing to be a scientific expedition, in reality, Cook carried Secret Instructions to find and make detailed charts and observations of the great southern continent. He was directed by the Admiralty to ‘cultivate a Friendship and Alliance’ with the Natives, ‘making them presents of such Trifles as they may Value.’

Despite instructions to obtain consent from Indigenous people, he took possession of the entire east coast of Australia as if the country was uninhabited. The concept of terra nullius (empty land) was born. This was the beginning of a disregard for the rights of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people that continues 250 years later.

Too Many Cooks examines the consequences of Cook’s expeditions for Indigenous people in Australia by bringing together a unique exhibition of works from the University of Tasmania’s Fine Art Collection. The Aboriginal and other artists represented draw attention to the impacts of British invasion and expose a conflicted account of European discovery and settlement of Australia, focussing a critical gaze on our national story.

This exhibition also celebrates the strength and beauty of Indigenous culture in Australia that has been the foundation of survival for sixty millenia.

The sanctity of Country as a repository of knowledge, history and spirituality forms an essential common thread for Indigenous people across Australia. Walking on Country, learning from Country and sharing stories through creative practice locates artists in the place of their ancestors and renews continuity of culture that has been a foundation of survival during times of disruption and denial.

Making art that respects and seeks justice for Country is an undeniable refutation of Cook’s presumption of terra nullius. More than this, it is an act of deep remembrance of landscape as an archive of knowledge, and a place of personal meaning.

walking around the country

looking at things

being shown important sites

making connections with family and land

fishing, talking

sharing food and laughter

going back to the place

where my grandmother and her

mother were born

going back there with my grandmother

going places I've read about in libraries

the history of our people before

and after the invasion

the impact on my family

seeing the country through

my grandmother's eyes

learning about bush foods

going back to the city

and making work

space

heat

dust

flies

throwing the cast net

heartland - Judy Watson 1992

The artist John Webber accompanied Cook on his third voyage, creating the first European image of Tasmanian Aboriginal people with a sensitive portrait of a Neunone man. He also produced a portrait of Cook before embarking on this voyage. Both characters appear in an unfinished drawing of Cook’s meeting with Aboriginal people on Bruny Island. This drawing seems to have been superseded by a later work of Webber’s, depicting the historic moment of Cook’s death in Hawaii.

Both images share compositional similarities but describe vastly different scenes. On Bruny Island, Cook presents a medal to a Neunone man, attempting to create a relationship between Aboriginal people and the British empire that would soon result in dispossession and genocide. In Hawaii, Cook’s disingenuous diplomacy backfires when he is killed by Hawaiians protecting their king from Cook’s attempt to take him hostage following the theft of a boat.

The entire coastline of eastern Australia was visited by Cook during his first and third voyages, from tropical Possession Island off the tip of Cape York to the temperate grandeur of Bruny Island in the far south. Like those of numerous other Dutch, British, and French navigators, these were journeys popularly celebrated as testament to European accomplishment and superiority. Yet, Indigenous peoples of Australia also made their way to the island continent by sea travel over 2,000 generations ago, following epic migrations across multiple continents.

European visual art and literature are replete with celebration of the glory of maritime culture. This usually ignores the ugly reality that sailing ships were instruments of colonial power and the insidious trade in slaves that enabled the spectacular growth of Western colonial economies.

The Indigenous canoes of eastern Australia were a common subject for European expedition artists. However, their ethnographic perspective ensured that these depictions mostly served as evidence of the primitivism of First Nations technology. Through different eyes, the Palawa canoes of Tasmania can be recognised as objects of elegance and beauty.

Over a period of at least 60,000 years, Indigenous people occupied almost every part of the continent now known as Australia. Yet, despite instructions issued by the British Admiralty, no recognition of the inherent rights of the hundreds of First Nations of Australia was made by Cook or any of the colonial governors who followed in his wake.

Intimate knowledge of climate, biodiversity, landscape, law and history has been woven together across two thousand generations of stories, ceremonies and songlines to celebrate the intricacy and wisdom of a diversity of Indigenous lifeworlds that bound people to their Country. Blind to the beauty of these cultures, British imperialism instead imagined an empty land (terra nullius) that could be available for the taking. It was not until 1996 that the Wik People of Cape York won landmark legal recognition in the Australian High Court that their Native Title rights could co-exist with British property law. Significantly, it was on Cape York that Cook made the first claim over Aboriginal territory on behalf of the British Crown.

Ancestral traditions of visual culture continue to celebrate rich connections to Country through unique painting and sculpture. More recently, technologies of photography and digital media document the ongoing struggle for proper recognition of Indigenous sovereignty and calls for constitutional recognition and treaty.

Tragically, the defining experience of Indigenous people in Australia since Cook’s arrival has been displacement from their Country by settlers. In many regions, this involved what many scholars describe as ethnic cleansing or genocide; processes which deeply challenge popular conceptions of a continent peacefully settled. Official narratives avoided such descriptions by substituting suggestions that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were inherently inferior to British society; arguing that their extinction was inevitable.

Alongside direct impacts on Indigenous populations, colonial histories over-wrote sixty millennia of knowledge, stories and ceremonies with a memoire of imperial pride, nationalism and scientific racism. A popular desire for Aborigines to eventually disappear accompanied the redefinition of ancient cultural landscapes as resources awaiting exploitation and development.

Colonial artists, often under direct instruction by military commanders, crafted a visual rhetoric that communicated peaceful, picturesque opportunities for new settlers, and the success of colonial enterprise. In Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania), this involved the visual exclusion of Aboriginal people from colonial landscapes until the Black War was over. Then, from the early 1830s, Aboriginal people were reinscribed in colonial landscapes as a melancholic testament to colonial achievement.

Many contemporary Australian artists seek to interrogate the rhetoric of colonial art by refiguring iconic scenes and historic figures, including Cook; exposing the processes at play in our visual history.

This exhibition also celebrates the strength and beauty of Indigenous culture in Australia that has been the foundation of survival for sixty millenia.

In 1988, Australia celebrated the bicentennial of the arrival of Governor Arthur Philip’s First Fleet of British colonists. This celebration echoed earlier commemorations of Cook’s visit, and similarly struggled to situate the First Nations of Australia, who still consider these British ‘heroes’ as invaders. Such celebrations have little scope to acknowledge the intergenerational legacies of genocide, exile and injustice that were consequences of their arrival.

The Bicentennial was met with some of the largest public protests ever seen, as sympathetic Australians from all walks of life marched alongside their Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander comrades to demand an honest account of history. As part of this response, artists from Indigenous, colonial and migrant origins created a series of screen printed posters titled Right Here, Right Now - 1988, seeking to capture a moment in Australian history that forever changed our national view of the past and our relationship with the future.

Right Here, Right Now - 1988 was arranged by Co-Media Adelaide. The series toured nationally to ten galleries, including the University of Tasmania. Themes of land rights, deaths in custody and dispossession mounted a strong rejection of the official message of celebration, while powerfully acknowledging the survival of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture and continuing demands for justice.

walking around the country

looking at things

being shown important sites

making connections with family and land

fishing, talking

sharing food and laughter

going back to the place

where my grandmother and her

mother were born

going back there with my grandmother

going places I've read about in libraries

the history of our people before

and after the invasion

the impact on my family

seeing the country through

my grandmother's eyes

learning about bush foods

going back to the city

and making work

space

heat

dust

flies

throwing the cast net

heartland - Judy Watson 1992