enjoy the day off
this post was submitted on 25 Jan 2026
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Today marks the start of the genocide of Aboriginal peoples and colonisation of Australia began. That today is a day of mourning not celebration.
And that Captain Cook is a piece of shit.
Oh, I wasn't aware that he was that guy. But for sure, all colonisers are awful people who destroyed cultures irreplaceably
Umm cook was an explorer and cartographer, just like Abel Tasman. Yet no one is carrying pitchforks to his memorial.
The hate against Cook is just people looking for a person to blame even without reason. He mapped Australia for the british he didn't colonise it. There was no way he could've 'colonised' with is crew of less than a hundred on the Endevour.
If you want to blame someone blame George the third, or Townshend who made the decision to colonise. Without them Australia would have been left behind (/colonised by someone else).
You can blame Gov. Phillip who lead the colonisation and was responsible for many of the decisions made.
But no, that would require people to Wikipedia for 3 minutes before founding an opinion. So we'll just jump on the uninformed bandwagon and scream "blame Cook!"
And to be clear, my opinion is that a lot that was done at the time was atrocious, and carried on far to long into far, far, far too recent history.
Just Cook wasn't the one that colonised Australia, he just drew it on paper and told the king. If you want to blame the colonisation, blame Townshend who made the decision yet many don't know him. If you want to blame the decisions when they got here, Phillip was in charge.
Blame the people who made the decisions not whomever is easiest/closest.
The thing about Cook is it’s regarded as first contact and everything that followed was after his landing and reports of what he saw and from this was the understanding that the land was terra nullius rather than occupied.
Captain Cook had nothing to do with the colony. He died in 1779 - years before the settlers arrived. While agreeing with the sentiment that the arrival of Europeans is not cause for celebration, Cook had always been a dumb target for protesting Jan 26.
He was directly responsible for locating the site and reporting it back to Britain. It was literally his mission to find land to steal and place the natives under British rule.
Actually, it ends up looking even worse for Cook. His instructions specifically said:
So either he ignored the Crown's instructions to get "consent", or he (and not later colonists) is the original source of claims of terra nullius.
His mission was to observe the transit of Venus. The expedition was scientific in nature first and foremost.
You're speaking of the secret instructions issued to him by the Admiralty to locate the fabled southern continent and hopefully claim it for England. Tasman by this stage had found NZ and I think Van Diemans Land. Yes he found the east coast of Australia and "claimed" it for England. It was all in vain though, the distances were way too far for anything to come of it. To Cook at the time, it was a side trip.
There were two parliamentary inquiries submitted to the British parliament in 1779 and 1785 recommending colonisation of New Holland, but even then: well after Cook's death, such an expedition was seen as too expensive.
Then the English learned that the French were preparing to colonise and it was suddenly a British priority to get to Australia.
I don't see how anything to do with the colonisation had anything to do with Captain Cook. You could swap Cook out for any other ship's captain who was taking the scientists to see Venus and the rest of the expedition plays out much the same. Cook didn't colonise Australia. He encountered the Guugu Yimithirr people in Northern Queensland and tried to treat with the peacefully - mostly succeeding. He certainly didn't set about killing them all.
Arthur Philip should be the person people direct their ire at. But he doesn't have a statue in Melbourne. King George III would be another candidate that made sense. Only George III also doesn't have a statue in Melbourne.