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Canberra’s Captain Cook Memorial Globe




Canberra’s Captain Cook Memorial Globe sits on Regatta Point at Commonwealth Park on the banks of Lake Burley Griffin. It was built to commemorate the Bicentenary of British Captain James Cook’s first sighting of the east coast of Australia – where Sydney is now located, which he called Botany Bay. Queen Elizabeth II officially inaugurated the memorial on April 25, 1970. The other part of the memorial is the Captain Cook Memorial Jet – a fountain in the lake which operated from 2:00-4:00pm daily.
Designed by Walter Ralston Bunning, the bronze, copper, and enamel globe of the world depicts Cook’s three expeditions to the southern hemisphere with the history explained on the handrail. James Cook (1728-1779) was a British explorer, navigator, and cartographer. Essentially, he took the voyage to create a map of the uncharted region and to observe the transit of Venus across the Sun, visible in the south. It was on his first voyage (1768-71) that he sighted Australia in his ship, Endeavour.


He was 39 years old when he sailed from England in 1768 across the Pacific to Tahiti where the transit of Venus was observed. Searching for Terra Australis (the southern land), he circumnavigated the islands now known as New Zealand, and sighted Terra Australis on April 19, 1770. He landed ten days later. He originally called it Stingray Bay, but changed it to Botany Bay after the unique plants found there. He met the original owners of the land, the Gweagal. He only stayed two months, and set sail for a northern journey along the eastern coast on June 11, 1770. He ran aground a week later on the Great Barrier Reef, so he stayed for seven weeks near where Cooktown is located, until repairs were completed. He then continued home to England. In his second and third voyages to the southern hemisphere, he did not land in Australia. Hence he only ever spent less than four months in Australia.  






 

 

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MARTINA NICOLLS  is an international human rights-based consultant in education, healing and wellbeing, peace and stabilization, foreign aid audits and evaluations, and the author  of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce  (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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