James Cook was a Captain in the British Royal Navy who was known for exploring a lot of places, using his expertise in navigation and cartography. He claimed to have discovered a few places, which he hadn’t really, and ended up being done in on an island of Hawaii.
So, now that’s out of the way, we can talk about the effect that people like Cook and colonialization generally had on the world. While they did much for making the world more connected, they did it in a way that all but obliterated any culture they came into contact with.
From an Australian perspective, Cook wasn’t even close to discovering it. He may have been the first from Britain, but he wasn’t the first European, and definitely not the first human. The credit for that goes to the indigenous population, the multiple Aboriginal nations who inhabited the land, having travelled across from Papua New Guinea some 60,000 years prior.
It takes a pretty confident bloke to rock up somewhere, see other people, and think they’ve discovered somewhere new. It’s also pretty poor form to declare a place full of people “terra nullius” and just move in. Ok, that wasn’t Cook as such, but it was the colonialists who came after him.
The British culture was very heavily dependent on ownership and, more specifically, land ownership so when the came to Australia and found these people who were, to them, other and who observed no ownership of the land so far as the British could see, they saw no problem with simply claiming the land as their own.
While this was a problem in and of itself, it has led to a whole raft of other problems, notably racism. Racism stems from the idea of other based solely on the outward appearance of a person. We know now that the idea of race within the human species is pretty ridiculous considering the miniscule variation between individuals on a genetic level. It also seems ridiculous to judge a person based on the amount of melanin they produce, and to then decide that the amount of melanin bears any relation on what sort of a person they are.
Of course, first you have to see them as people, which the British didn’t. While it is a myth that they were covered by the Flora and Fauna Act until 1967 (you can find a good breakdown of this here: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-03-20/fact-check-flora-and-fauna-1967-referendum/9550650), they were seen as something less than the while settlers.
Fast forward to today, and the long reaching effects of those colonialists is still being felt. We see people raging against the co-called privileges that the aboriginal community enjoy, in the form of affirmative action, etc. What people don’t see is the underlying discrimination which still exists towards Aboriginal people that makes these initiatives necessary.
On the other side of this is the blame laid at the feet of all those with British or just white European ancestry for the misdeeds of those colonialists as if we (speaking as someone with both British and general European ancestry) were somehow culpable for the actions of people to whom we might not even be related.
Yes, I enjoy a certain amount of privilege as a person of white colouring, but I also suffer discrimination as someone who is female, and of a lower socio-economic background. In a perfect world, all people would be judged by who they are rather than what they are but we stuck with a legacy of a people long since dead which we must discard but not forget if we are to move forward as one people because, if we forget, we are doomed to repeat, and repeat and repeat, until the end of time.
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