British and Australian regret over Cooks treatment of Indigenous people would go a long way to enhancing understanding of the continents shared history

The British government has issued an oh-so-carefully worded expression of regret for the killing of Mori in Aotearoa, todays New Zealand, at the point of first contact during Lieutenant James Cooks voyage of discovery 250 years ago.

Regrets! The old empire certainly has had cause for a few when it comes to the violence it has meted out to the indigenes of the places it took during Britains colonial expansion.

For the deaths of a million Irish in the potato famine. For the Kenyans tortured and imprisoned during the Mau Mau insurgency. For the Indians killed in the Amritsar massacre. And, now, for the Mori, whose first contact with Cooks HMS Bark Endeavour in 1769 was characterised by disastrous violence for the first Aotearoans.

After Endeavour anchored near the eastern bank of the Tranganui River close to New Zealands present-day Gisborne, Te Maro, a senior man of the Ngti Oneone group, was promptly shot and killed while leading a ceremonial challenge to the British sailors. At least eight more Mori were killed over the next few days in what British history has largely cast, based on the diaries of Cook and others on the Endeavour, as a misunderstanding.

As New Zealand counts down to next weeks 250th anniversary of Cooks arrival there, Britains high commissioner in the country, Laura Clarke, made a statement of regret about the violent first contact.

Here on behalf of the four countries of the United Kingdom, on behalf of the people of those four countries I acknowledge the pain of those first encounters, she said.

The violence Clarke referred to was stemmed by Tupaia, a Tahitian priest and experienced seaman who joined the Endeavour in the Society Islands and helped Cook and his crew navigate to New Zealand and onwards to the east coast of Australia.

The remarkable story of Tupaia, his skills as a navigator and his fractious relationship with Cook and his crew, has been lost in the non-Indigenous commemorative frenzy, in Australia at least, about Endeavours arrival and its supposed critical role in national birth at a time when this continent was already replete with hundreds of nations reaching back tens of thousands of years.

He is celebrated in Tahiti and New Zealand. But here in Australia Tupaia has largely fallen through the cracks of a national non-Indigenous narrative that places Cooks arrival at the centre of modern Australian birth that ignores the sensibilities of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Its a trope that has long trivialised the violence that unfolded after Endeavours arrival at Kamay (Botany Bay) on 29 April 1770 conflict that was, unfortunately, prescient for all that would eventually follow Cooks colonial claim.

New Zealand has been far more engaged with Mori sentiment towards Cook and how his anniversary might be marked than Australia is with Indigenous views about how to commemorate the great pathfinder and cartographers arrival here. This shouldnt surprise. For Mori culture has long been central to New Zealands mainstream identity and politics, especially compared with Australia where for generations governments and cultural institutions have largely relegated 60,000-plus years of continuous Aboriginal civilisation to the margins of history to something unconnected over there that happened before settlement and the oppressive white Australian federation.

New Zealands ministry for culture and heritage, which is organising a replica Endeavour circumnavigation of the country, has, for example, instructed the ship only to stop at ports where a welcome is clear from Mori communities.

Will we ever see a day in Australia where the government is similarly alive to Indigenous sentiment and sensibility about the way history and national foundation is celebrated? While we close our eyes and think of Australia Day, we will see soon enough. For just as Aboriginal groups protested en masse against the 200th Cook celebrations in 1970, and the 1988 bicentenary of invasion, Indigenous people will hit the streets and ports again on the lieutenants 250th.

There will be calls for the replica Endeavour which will circumnavigate Australia (Cook never did this in his own bark) as part of the commemorations here, to be banned from some ports. The response of a government led by Scott Morrison the member for Cook and a great booster of the lieutenant who will spend $50m in his honour, stripped from the ABC budget, next year will be instructive.

Until very recently commemorations at present-day Kurnell in southern Sydney, where Cook first set foot on the east coast, involved a recreation of the landing replete with the moment his crew shot two Gweagal men. The spears and shield of those men remain in the British Museum, with the continued requests of their Gweagal family for their return treated with cold English condescension, even, the descendants would say, contempt.

There were more violent encounters as Cook sailed up the east coast including at Endeavour River (Wabalumbaal) renaming, in the Queens English, Indigenous places as he progressed.

Cooks legacy, like the man, is complex. But whether white Australia likes it or not, in this countrys Indigenous consciousness he remains largely emblematic of the colonial and postcolonial violence and oppression that came after Arthur Phillips invasion 18 years later. The doorman to invasion.

Which is why a little British and Australian regret over Cooks treatment of the Aboriginal people would go a long way to enhancing understanding of the continents more recent shared history, as difficult and freighted with injustice and oppression as it is. Not least, that would be a small step on the road to the full-scale apology and reparations, well overdue, that both countries owe Indigenous Australians for all that British colonialism dealt them.

Paul Daley is a Guardian Australia columnist

This article was published by The Guardian on the 3rd of October 2019.