Australia and the Enlightenment

Captain Cook's Description of the Inhabitants of New Holland

Navigator William Dampier, whilst exploring the west coast of Australia in the 17^th century, famously described the Indigenous inhabitants of New Holland as “the miserablest people on earth”. In August 1770, decades after this less than flattering description, English Captain James Cook arrived and documented his own rather different impression of the First Australians. Not only did Cook describe the physical appearance of the local Indigenous inhabitants, their weapons, canoes, and houses, but he enunciates his observations of a people living a natural and harmonious way of life, free from the corruptions of the “civilised” world.



The "Landing of Captain Cook at Botany Bay, 1770" by E Phillips Fox, 1902. Note the savage and warlike depiction of the Indigenous Inhabitants in the background, opposing Cook's own description as a "timorous" people in the "Natural State". (Source: National Gallery of Victoria Website: http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/gordonbennett/education/01.html)



Captain Cook’s observation of the inhabitants of New Holland carries with it a generally positive air. Whilst mapping the East Coast of Australia in 1770, Cook described a “timorous and inoffensive” populace, with no interest in material possession, no need for clothing, no permanent housing, and no evidence of the engagement of trade with their Pacific neighbours. In the publication Captain James Cook describes his Impression of New Holland, written in August 1770, Cook does not merely dismiss the Aboriginal inhabitants as savage, brutish or primitive like his Western predecessors had done so before him. Instead, Cook appears to have drawn upon ideas of the Enlightenment, particularly the work of the French philosophe Rousseau and his concept of the Natural State of Man. Cook notes that the inhabitants of New Holland live in a naturally innocent, “tranquil” state, without want of material possession, and with no difference in individual class or wealth. Cook explains that living so far from civilisation and the material conveniences found in England, may appear to some to be a “wretched” and uncomfortable way of life. Instead, Cook claims that it is the lack of civilisation which makes the Indigenous inhabitants “far happier than we Europeans,” in a more wholesome and Natural State.

However, Cook’s perception of the Indigenous Australian’s contains an underlying current of paternalism, which was not uncommon in this era of colonisation. Cook marvels at the way the inhabitants of this vast land are seemingly disinterested by the gifts of cloth left on the beach by his crew. In the eyes of Cook, the Indigenous inhabitants of New Holland were able to live their lives based only on what was shared by the “Earth and Sea”, and they cared not for the pursuit of grand houses of personal belongings. Cook, whilst admiring this aspect of the society, may have seen the Indigenous inhabitants as living in this Natural State for the present, but in the future, may progress to a more Civilised State, and begin to covet material possession, wear clothing and live in permanent houses. In this sense, Cook may have thought, that, like an uncorrupted and innocent child, the inhabitants of New Holland will one day, in a sense, “grow up” and adopt the “civilised” ways of Britain. Thus, whilst Cook admires the way of life of the inhabitants of New Holland, he does so in a paternalistic way, from the viewpoint of the “civilised” world.

Image of English navigator Captain James Cook, by John Webber,1782, following his exploration of the East Coast of Australia (formerly New Holland), and description of its inhabitants in 1770. (Source: Australian Dictionary of Biography: Online Edition, http://adbonline.anu.edu.au/biogs/A010231b.htm)