Cook's Pacific Crossing
| Acts 17:26-27 ~James Harrison 1. Rise of Morning Star, Bornubirr To the beat of singing sticks our women dance in the moonlight before Japara, Moon-Man, husband to all women. Girls, do not catch Japara’s attention or look at him too closely, or you will conceive. Collect his nautilus shells, skeletons of dead moons, from the dugong’s waters. Drink each month Japara’s magic drink and you will be restored to life, never to die in the dreaming. Girls, finish your dance, Bornubirr, Morning Star, is coming, his bag full of next day’s gathering for you to do. 2. Transit of Venus at
Observation of the transit of Venus by Lieutenant James Cook, of His Majesty’s ship the Endeavour, and by Mr Charles Green, formerly assistant at the Royal Observatory of Greenwich, made by appointment of the Royal Society, at King George’s Island, in the black ink drawings of circles and crescents, with hackles of pulsating light above a singing horizon. 3. Hundreds of observations of the Sun and Moon and one of the transit of Mercury had left Mr Charles Green with no latitude for error: he tore up Abel Tasman’s old parchment of one island into two separate strips of land, edges tattered with empty bays and their new names scrawled like Maori spirals across the dry skin. 4. First Contact, Anchor, Sunday April 29. Wind southerly, clear weather, 2 miles in entrance, 5 fathoms. Tree-bark huts clump around smoking fires on both points of the shimmering bay. Our landing boats nudge the dreaming continent and scatter the lank black-haired natives from the empty shorelines to the dense woodlands. Two men advance to oppose our party with poisonous darts, inspect the glass beads and nails we left for them, and return to collect their bundles of darts
strewn like driftwood on dappled sands. One man targets our midshipman: three musket volleys intersect the silence of centuries, announcing our Empire’s possession of Terra Nullius, crimsoning with small shot the native’s shoulder. We reconnoitre
the native huts trembling with small wide-eyed children, fresh mussels broiling on hot coals, three canoes abandoned like empty oyster shells. Our axes begin to numb the unyielding gum trees into submission. 5. Rock of Ages The Endeavour nuzzles the east Australian coast, skirts the feathered tribes of and bears down on and the God-forsaken convicts of Governor Philip’s first fleet, while at Uluru the night sky shakes with ragged lightning as Japara’s people dance under warm rain, the rock’s riven side streaming with water, spreading blood-red ochre over the Great Southern Land, till the bright Morning Star rises to dispel the gathering darkness. |