History is never simple, and it should never be reduced to slogans. Australia is not the product of a crime scene, nor the result of a single narrative of guilt or glory. It is just the improbable outcome of ancient ideas, human ambition and extraordinary luck.
Sure, we can acknowledge the deep history of this land and the endurance of the early Aboriginals, but we can also recognise that the nation we inhabit today was built through exploration, enterprise and British civilisation. These truths are not enemies; they are threads in the same story.
To call Cook an “invader” is to misunderstand history and flatten it into ideology. He did not arrive seeking a continent to conquer. He arrived chasing a myth dreamed up by Greeks and Romans two thousand years earlier. What he found was not Terra Australis, but the edge of a land that others had missed through error, indifference and miscalculation.
And if Cook did not " invade " a continent, but simply stumbled upon its finest shore, then perhaps the real miracle is not that he arrived - but that no one else did before him.
It is now more than 250 years since Captain James Cook charted the east coast of Australia. In an age where history is often reduced to slogans and moral shortcuts, it is worth asking a simple but rarely explored question:
What was Cook actually doing here?
He certainly was not “invading” Australia as we know it, nor was he searching for it. Europeans had known of what was known as " New Holland " and it’s existence since the 1500s. Portuguese, Spanish and Dutch sailors had all encountered parts of its coastline long before Cook ever set sail.
What Cook was really searching for was something far older, grander and more mythical: Terra Australis - the legendary southern continent. Little did they know that it had been discovered but dismissed.
The Ancient Idea That Created a Modern Nation
The story begins long before Britain, before Europe’s empires, even before Rome.
The Phoenicians, brilliant seafarers based in what is now Lebanon, dominated Mediterranean trade from around 1500 to 300 BC. Around 550 BC, one Phoenician expedition is believed to have circumnavigated Africa - an astonishing feat not repeated for nearly 2,000 years.
When they returned, they reported something extraordinary: the sun appeared in a different position as they sailed around Africa. This observation helped Greek scholars reach a remarkable conclusion - the Earth was not flat. It was a sphere.
But the Greeks made a speculative leap that would echo through history. They reasoned that if the Earth was round, it must be balanced: as much land in the southern hemisphere as in the northern. Therefore, somewhere in the far south, there must exist a vast continent to counterbalance Eurasia.
They called it Terra Australis - the Southern Land.
When Rome conquered Greece militarily in 148 BC, the Greeks conquered Rome intellectually. Roman thinkers absorbed Greek geography, science and philosophy, including the idea of Terra Australis. The myth endured through centuries of European thought, quietly waiting to be proven.
Then came the discovery of the Americas.
With North and South America seemingly balancing the hemispheres, Terra Australis was no longer speculation - it felt inevitable. If the New World existed in the west, surely an even greater landmass awaited in the south.
And so the race began.
Near Misses, Wrong Turns and Fortunate Mistakes
By the late 1400s, the Portuguese had opened sea routes to India and Asia. Ships sailed endlessly between Europe and the East. Many encountered the western and northern coasts of New Holland, but they found little of any commercial value. This was not the fabled land of wealth and trade promised by legend.
So Terra Australis must lie further south.
In 1642, the Dutch East India Company sent its finest navigator, Abel Tasman, to find it. Sailing from Jakarta, Tasman ventured deep into the Southern Ocean. After months of empty seas, he encountered lush, green land - now called Tasmania.
For a moment, it must have seemed like the prize.
But Tasmania proved to be an island.
Tasman sailed east and discovered New Zealand, only to find it too was an island. Disheartened, he turned north, discovering Fiji before returning to Jakarta.
The following year, Tasman tried again - this time to locate the unexplored east coast of New Holland. The north, west and south had been charted, but the east remained a mystery. Yet in one of history’s most consequential errors, Tasman misread geography and concluded that New Guinea and Cape York formed a single landmass.
Had he realised the truth, the Dutch might well have colonised Australia’s east coast.
But he didn’t.
Tasman mapped the Gulf of Carpentaria, sailed west, and returned home. The Dutch lost interest. So did everyone else.
Again and again, the fertile eastern coastline - one of the world’s great natural prizes - was missed by chance, miscalculation and indifference. Spaniards, French, Chinese, Polynesians - all came close. None stayed.
Only the Aboriginal peoples had lived here continuously, in isolation from the rest of the world.
Cook’s Journey: Science, Myth and Accident
When James Cook departed England in 1768, Australia was not his destination. His official mission was scientific: to travel to Tahiti and observe the transit of Venus across the sun. Three expeditions were sent worldwide to gather data that would help calculate the distance between the Earth and the sun.
But Cook carried sealed orders, to be opened only after Tahiti.
When he read them, he was instructed to sail south in search of Terra Australis.
Guided in part by Polynesian navigational knowledge, Cook charted New Zealand with precision - something Tasman had never done. Then, in 1770, he encountered the coast of what is now Victoria.
Cook knew immediately this was not Terra Australis. It was the long-known New Holland - but unmapped along its eastern edge. So he did what explorers do: he turned north and recorded everything.
He entered Botany Bay, sailed past what would become Sydney Harbour, and continued up the coastline to Cape York. There, he claimed the east coast for Britain, naming it New South Wales.
He had not set out to find Australia.
He had stumbled upon its best part.
From Myth to Map: The Making of Australia
Cook went on to undertake two further epic voyages across the Pacific, mapping vast regions from Antarctica to Alaska. In the process, he finally disproved the myth of Terra Australis.
Yet the ancient name endured.
Australia - a Roman idea, born from Greek speculation, carried through medieval imagination - became reality.
Looking back, it is astonishing how much luck protected this continent from earlier colonisation. A wrong turn here. A miscalculation there. A decision not to sail north. A belief that barren land was worthless.
Had any of those moments unfolded differently, Australia’s history - and character - might have been utterly transformed.
Colonisation was inevitable. But it was Britain that arrived.
And from that encounter grew the language, laws, institutions and freedoms that define modern Australia.
A Nation Born of Chance
Two and a half centuries on, Australia remains a land shaped by accident and effort, conflict and cooperation, hardship and hope. It was not designed in a drawing room nor engineered by ideology. It was discovered, argued over, struggled for and built - slowly, imperfectly, and against the odds.
Australia is not an historical mistake.
It is one of history’s great improbable achievements.
And that is something worth defending, worth understanding, and worth celebrating.
My closing thoughts?
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