Foreword

 

There is something intrinsically special about Captain James Cook. Although relatively little of Cook's reputation derives from his Australian experiences, Australians have embraced his significance in ways not enjoyed by other great nautical explorers in Australian waters such as Jansz, Dampier and Tasman. He is remembered as the man who ‘discovered’ the east coast of Australia and claimed it for the Crown, and viewed by many as a heroic, nation-founding figure.

The opportunity to broaden the appreciation of Cook's achievements for Australian audiences and place his momentous voyages in their wider Pacific context was presented to the National Museum of Australia in 2006 with the offer of a display of over 350 items of Pacific material culture from the Cook/Forster collection at the Institute of Cultural and Social Anthropology at Georg August University in Göttingen, Lower Saxony. The resulting exhibition, Cook's Pacific Encounters, drew record crowds fascinated by the evidence of life in the Pacific at the point of contact with Europeans, and the value and meanings attached to these items by their collectors.

A public symposium, Discovering Cook's Collections, was held at the National Museum a month after Cook's Pacific Encounters opened. A collaboration between the Australian National University's Centre for Cross-Cultural Research and the National Museum, the symposium provided leading scholars in the field of Cook studies with a forum to explore different perspectives on the contemporary significance of the objects and the relationship between the voyagers and the Indigenous people they encountered. The papers presented by Adrienne Kaeppler, Paul Tapsell, Lissant Bolton, Greg Dening, Paul Turnbull, Nigel Erskine and Doreen Mellor from the National Library of Australia are the subject of this book, and I take great pleasure in warmly recommending them to you.

 

Craddock Morton
Director
National Museum of Australia