Trent Dalton, from The Weekend Australian, 2 September 2017, where the main title is “The Story of Us”
The story was always too big, too complex to fit neatly inside the plaques of big city statues. The story of Captain Cook’s first epic voyage of discovery is too grand, too long to fit neatly inside a tweet or a T-shirt quip or a few cheap words spray-painted in a hurry.
The first man to tell the story was James Cook himself. He told it as it unfolded, the spellbinding tale of his three years aboard a frumpy-bottomed coal boat called Endeavour; three years of wonder, adventure, miraculous survival, navigational genius and breathtaking courage that he detailed in short, sharp sentences scribbled on to a series of cabin papers that would form a doorstopper of a journal that would come to be called “Manuscript One”, the founding document of the National Library of Australia.
Captain James Cook in a 1775 portrait by Nathaniel Dance-Holland, and HMS Endeavour in a painting by naval historian Gregory Robinson; next year marks the 250th anniversary of Endeavour’s sailing from Plymouth in England on a three-year journey that took it across the world and included the British discovery of Australia Continue reading
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