The Ballad of Botany Bay

12 November 2009

To the Royal National Park, second oldest in the world (after the American one, because as cool as Australia is, America is cooler, yes?). We skated through because although there are signs saying you have to pay $11 to enter, there appears to be nowhere to actually pay this. And you wouldn't want to piss off a park ranger. They could write you up. Or sic wild kangaroos on you.

The goal here is Botany Bay, ground zero for the genocide of Aboriginals and all that. Definitely wanted to get here, having heard Irish folk songs (my parents have random taste in music—you should have heard my 4-year old brother singing republican anthems about killing the British in nursery school) since childhood, many of which focus on the hell that was a transportation sentence to Botany Bay. It's actually fairly impressive, in that while this is essentially their Jamestown, rather than a shrine they've got a park surrounded by an oil refinery, a garbage dump, a power station, and an airport.

The park itself has the requisite Aboriginal name appended to it (every place seems to have had one added to whatever the white name was, obviously this completely makes up for slaughter and rape and other icky things) and which I have already forgotten—Botany Bay is just more alliterative, you know? Sadly overrun with schoolchildren—god, why can't kids ever be quiet? Blue water, a museum with cannon salvaged from a reef, chunks of wood from the hull of another ship Captain Cook sailed and which is sunk in Newport, in the States, interestingly.

Captain James Cook, of Whitby, Yorkshire, got here in 1788 on a voyage of discovery in a converted coal transport. He brought scientists and artists and also the first white guy to be buried here, Forby something, who is buried and got an obelisk for this achievement. Celebrated and revered, Cook was killed by Pacific islanders on his third trip out. Tragic. We have now stood on the very same rocks that he landed on—there is a very nice beach about 3 feet away, and no explanation why they chose to land on rocks instead, as it must have been more awkward. Two aboriginal men met them on the beach and told them to get lost, for which they were shot in the legs. Nice!

As I say, every national park and museum here makes a concerted effort to start with Aboriginal stories and ownership claims and interviews with old people and mention of catastrophic effects and all that. It's sort of beating you over the head with it, and its admirable in that clearly they're making an effort to be sorry and that's worth something. But I just can't see that anyone ought to think putting up new signs can seriously address what was ultimately one conquest in a long line of them—of course we should learn all we can and acknowledge other cultures and their losses, because knowledge is never wasted. But in the end, someone wins and someone loses and that's the way it is. This feels more like competitive political correctness.

But then I got bored of being philosophical and spent my time playing with Picasa to make my artsy pictures black and white instead.