There is far more you can say about what James Cook did not do than about the things that he did as captain of the Endeavour. He did not discover Australia. He did not circumnavigate the continent. He did not establish any settlement. Indeed, he only made landfall a handful of times.

He did establish beyond question that New Guinea was divided from New Holland, but upon completing his voyage up the immensely long eastern coast Cook also laid claim to New South Wales for the British Crown. He thereby marks the beginning of the continuous British association with this island continent that led in incremental stages to the creation of a penal colony, the establishment of other British settler societies, and eventually a nation state – while a long series of injustices and calamities were experienced by the Indigenous people of the contintent: the killings, the stolen children, the loss of language and culture, the diseases, the alcohol. But was the line of association that begins with Endeavour even continuous? If you had been a Dharawal youth of 14 years of age in 1770, living with your people in the neighbourhood of Botany Bay, for some days you might have had the opportunity of seeing the inexplicable sight of clothed men emerging uninvited from inside a strange contraption, and then fossicking about, helping themselves to plants on your own country. Not until 1788 would you have seen anything again remotely comparable, by which time the youth (if he survived) would have been 32 years old.

Naturally, the vast majority of Aboriginal people across the rest of the continent had no knowledge of Cook or Endeavour at the time, nor indeed until long afterwards, and many communities did not encounter European settlers until many decades later, in some cases upwards of a century or even longer.

What we can certainly agree upon, however, is that, following the American Revolution and a failed experimental penal colony in West Africa, some of the knowledge about Australia that Cook and his companions took back to England, along with the active advocacy of Joseph Banks, led to the decision to establish a penal colony at Botany Bay, even though these developments took place long after Cook’s death.