Teacher notes

Before 1770 Video Transcript

In 1770, the British navigator, Lieutenant James Cook, arrived on this island continent. He was not the first visitor, stranger, to arrive, but the first to claim the entire East coast for the British crown.

Before 1770, this land had been owned and occupied by a population estimated at over 750,000. We are the oldest living culture on the planet, unbroken over thousands of generations.

Before 1770, this land is criss-crossed with some 800 nations and clan groups, all with intimate cultural and spiritual connections to country, to water, to living creatures, and to each other.

Before 1770, our nations are enshrined through our law and spiritual beliefs, enriched by kinship systems, sophisticated knowledge practices and ingenious land management systems.

Before 1770, our song lines, art and ceremonies mapped country and recorded our history, our existence and our Dreaming. They are the world’s first maps, the oldest rock art, and part of the largest gallery in the world.

Before 1770, there are as many as 250 languages, and up to 800 dialects spoken in every corner of this continent. Language that transmits culture, law and knowledge across generations. They are the world’s oldest oral stories.

Before 1770, we transformed the harshest habitable continent into a land of bounty, through innovation, adaption, and an intimate knowledge of the natural environment. Hundreds of nations each managed their land, but together, it was the biggest estate on Earth.

And before 1770, we were here.

Bark Canoe video [on Vimeo] Transcript

[Painting representing a long-ago scene of an Aboriginal group on a beach is shown. Some people are sitting around a campfire. Two men are in the water holding spears.]

Jan Rasborsek, Principal, Botany Bay Environmental Education Centre:

[Video and still images of the Botany Bay EEC are shown during the following, including a group of primary school students on a walk in the bush]

Botany Bay is one of 25 environmental and zoo education centres in New South Wales, located at Kurnell within Kamay Botany Bay National Park. Botany Bay EEC supports Aboriginal education for all students. We work with our local Aboriginal community, the department’s Aboriginal education and wellbeing team, and our local AECG. This film supports the importance of the bark canoes that were sighted in 1770 in Botany Bay.

[Still images of historical drawing of people in bark canoes, then video of present-day canoe-making scenes]

Uncle John Kelly, Aboriginal Knowledge Holder

[Video of the speaker intercut with still images of people in the bush working with large sections of bark on the ground]

I’m a cultural teacher, in the same way as my brother Dean. We had to live and breathe our culture at a early age. Just carrying on some of the things that my father’s taught me and my mother was an artist. She taught me how to paint and my father told me the stories so I’m painting my mother and father’s stories and different designs now, in life.

[Videos and still photographs of a group of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal men, women and children working with trees, smoke, tools, bark and rope made from bark in a clearing in a forest and in a campsite are shown throughout the rest of the ‘Bark canoe’ video.]

This is part of rekindling the fire to go back to the proper way of building nuwis, bark canoes.

[Two people working with tools to scrape layers off sheets of bark.]

This here gives us an opportunity to return back in time, to return back in history. It’s the oldest craft in the world, the canoe.

We’re using stringyback trees at the moment as our methods of getting it off the tree. We’re skinning the bark off and trying to leave a little bit on the tree so the tree survives. We’re doing the right thing. We’re carrying on culture.

[Video of a man waving smoke from leaves in a bark container over himself, then another man tapping two sticks together.]

Uncle Dean Kelly, Aboriginal Knowledge Holder:

So there’s a process we go through culturally. That’s important. That’s about respect. Before we even go near a tree we’ve got to ask permission from that land and them old spirits. Whoever we’re teaching also’s got to understand that we can’t just go in there and grab whatever we want. It’s not ours, you know, it’s there to keep us alive and work with us and live with us. The ultimate outcome of boats like these is to have Aboriginal people paddling around in them – kids, families, but also non-Aboriginal people. These are part of education. If people are going to be responsible for our culture they need to be educated about it in a good way and the best tool we have is our culture to do that. We’ve also got to understand that the knowledge always remains with Aboriginal people. Yes, we’re sharing it but we’re not giving it away to be exploited, and we’ve seen that.

We hope to be at an important event next year, the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary to the arrival of Cook. We hope to have these boats there floating on the water. That would be important because it hasn’t happened in a long time. We would like to show our presence and show that our culture’s still alive and living. It’s therefore for everyone to see and it’s their heritage as much as it’s ours.

[Uncle Dean Kelly and Richard Swain]

David Payne, Curator, Historic Vessels at Australian Maritime Museum:

I’ve probably done about twenty of these now and still learning every time. But, you know, the boats are one thing. The other thing that comes out of this that turns out to be way, way more important was just being engaged with the Indigenous community. This is such an important part of their culture. The boats are just one of their biggest implements and it’s become a really big movement. It’s brought a lot of people together, way more than I anticipated but we’ve had all sorts of communities start up and build more boats and get involved with things. That’s what it should be about, sharing and working with them.

[Image of Rachel Shields and Rachael Cavanagh]

Rachel Shields:

… relate to the tree in another way today. So this is the stringybark and from the inner bark, which is the closest to its actual body, is where we’re going to create string that you can then use for the canoe making as well.

[Rachel holds a metre-long strip of golden-brown bark that is about ten centimetres wide.]

So this is the inner bark here. It’s a beautiful colour and we need to make this very pliable to be able to shape it.

There’s a lot of possibilities with all the bark but when we start to work with it, in relating with it we’re giving it more instructions as to what’s possible as well as well at it showing us what’s possible.

[Rachel is teasing out fibres from the strip of bark.]

Well in here you can see all these different fibres. All these different fibres give you strength. That’s part of you relating to that tree too, part of its life cycle’s becoming more and more aware so it’s not just turning something into rope, it’s also relating.

[Video of men working together to use rope to shape one end of one canoe by folding the sides in and using a stick bound with rope.]

[Still shot of Uncle John Kelly standing with three completed canoes]

[Credits read:

Thanks to the Aboriginal people who supported the making of this film including Uncle Dean Kelly, John Kelly, Terry Kelly, Layne Brown and Cooma Swain.

Thanks to Yula-Punaal Education & Healing Centre and Mirring Aboriginal Corporation.

Filmed on location at Forestry Corporation NSW Watagan State Forest.

Photography by Jan and Chris Rasborsek.]

ANMM Cook 2020: Mapping the Coast Video Transcript

*Sound of the ocean and seagulls

William Frame, Head of Modern Archives and Manuscripts, British Library is speaking:

The Admiralty commissioned Cook’s first voyage jointly with the Royal Society, so it had both a strategic and also had a scientific aim of documenting the natural world. They were actually sent out to observe the Transit of Venus, but the Admiralty also asked Cook to search the Pacific to look for other lands, which resulted in him charting New Zealand, and also the East Coast of Australia. He was very, very skilled, and that was probably the reason why he was chosen to lead the voyage, not only was he somebody who could captain the ship, but he could also navigate and he could also survey and chart the lands that he visited, so that Cook’s charts stand up very well both for the time but also you look at them today and you can see the places that he charted, the East Coast of Australia, also New Zealand, you look at his charts and these are recognisably the places we see on the map today.

Cook’s survey of the East Coast of Australia was done using a method know as a running survey. It was done onboard ship, primarily, although occasionally they would land and take more details and bearings, but they would sail along the coast and they would take bearings using prominent landmarks and then by doing that Cook was able to build up a systematic picture of the coast. He would also measure longitude and latitude and he was able to fill in the gaps in the chart.

It was a very meticulous way of working; it took a lot of persistence and a lot of skill. Cook was a skilled surveyor so he was able to use astronomical observations and take bearings of prominent features on the coastline, he was able to form a triangulation to measure angles and work out distances, so in a sense he was using the information available to him and the tools available to him to produce what was a very meticulous, a very carefully prepared survey.

So a set of the charts were sent to the Admiralty – Cook’s employer, and they were used in the official publication of the voyages so that one of the purposes of charting was that then the charts that Cook brought back could be engraved and included in published volumes, so become part of the public record. Cook, also we believe, retained a set of copies himself and we think some of the charts that the library hold, we know that they were brought at auction in the mid-19th century and we think some of them probably came from Cook’s family, so they were sold off. We also think some may have come from people who worked on the official publication of the voyages, so they’ve come from a number of different sources. The library also has a collection of material that was bequeathed by Joseph Banks, who was the naturalist of the voyage, and later became very significant here in British science and public life.

In terms of how they are produced, we think a lot of the work was probably done in the great cabin, so we would assume that the charts would have been stored there or in one of the other nearby rooms, which were the main offices of the captain, but also Joseph Banks and his party, we know also worked in the great cabin, so a lot of work we think was potentially done there and the charts themselves, we don’t know exactly where they were stored but that area of the ship was definitely the sort of engine room in terms of production of not just the charts, but also the natural history drawings and the accounts that were written up.

One of the things actually was there was a tradition in Europe of publishing charts, very high-quality charts, very well produced charts. The Dutch, for example, did a lot of exploration earlier than Cook, and they actually charted the other coastlines of Australia, and they published those charts. If you look at a map before Cook went to Australia, it appears with the name New Holland which the Dutch gave to Australia. So Cook’s charting of the East Coast and also his decision to call the East Coast “New South Wales” was, in a sense, his way of showing that the British had charted that section, that this was something new, that it wasn’t simply the missing coast of New Holland, it was New South Wales.

Cook’s charts stand up very well against modern surveys, obviously he was not using the sort of techniques we use today, but his skill as a cartographer, as a surveyor, means that when you look at his maps, you ascertain you look at the map and it is visibly the coast that you see on the map today. So it’s is very, very impressive, very, very thorough, methodical, piece of work and the charts remained in use for many decades after they were created.