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.
MARTINA NICOLLS
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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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