Should we stop celebrating Capt James Cook?

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Sainteric said:
Yes but 50 years before the civil war wilberforce a pesky no good christian made slavery illegal through the british parliament and the british navy effectively stopped the slave trade. The POTUS desk is wood from one of the specially comissioned antislave ship made by the chief carpenter of the RN. Recently the british pm gave obama a pen holder made from its twin, obama return gift was an ipod. The american south in the west was the last bastion of slavery. The south was considered evil in its own time.

Colonialisation was not it was (by todays standards mistakenly) seen as a good thing for the natives in the pacific and americas.

That is a big difference
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agree

but a general's job is not a political or social one. We might not like the side he fought for but like the Bismark (the ship), Rommel or Napoleon you respect their achievements.
 

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Well if we are going to stop celebrating those who killed and murdered it's about time we talked about old Mo the merchant warlord that slaughtered anyone that he came across. Someone I don't think that will be happening because he wasn't a white cis male.
 
King Brown said:
Why should the victors apologise for winning?

The difference between Confederate monuments and Australian ones (or any others you might wish to think of) is that Australia celebrates the victors. Confederate monuments venerate the losers.
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Nope. Many families in the USA would have people from the family lines, who were killed fighting under the Confederate flag, it has nothing to do with winners and losers, ask some historians about death and loss in the Union Army too.
Slavery was not the only thing they fought about in that war, lots of dead Confederates would never have owned slaves and some of them their lives would have been not much , if any, better, also besides black soldiers fighting with the Union, black soldiers would have fought with the Confederacy too. In some form or another.
(Too much American TV I think for some Aussies some is good some is off the mark.)
We sit here in Australia and try to look at the American civil war, and we, most of us, don't really see it , we can't we weren't part of it, perhaps a handful of British Australians or others may have gone to that war for adventure, but the reality of the differences and other problems of statehood and nation building were all involved in that war, so Robert E Lee statue does not just represent the slave owners movement and by the way their economy , all sorts of things caused that war.

Look at the American independence war, or the war in 1812 , between Britain and the USA, the War of Independence was also a civil war, but most of us look at it as the USA Americans vs the British, the American Colonials, the Continentals, were mostly British, like Australians would have been in 1861, fighting the British overlords, over unfair taxes and other things too. Staues are history.
Cook was a bloody sailor of his time, and he did land on the east coast nearly sank and did discover a new land, even though the Dutch may have been around before in the West and the French were hanging around, what the hell has that got to do with the invasion of Australia, and its first people, that happened, but that's history.
I simply don't see the point of any of these arguments. No one wins wars anyway.
 
Lebbo73 said:
I didn't even know that he was celebrated?
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Hah good point , Cook it's really not about him, and his statue is it? It's about Federation , what was that 113 years after Arthur Phillip?????
Why does it always bring up the treatment of first nation people, it shouldn't.
History helps you move forward, we are slowly doing that yes, but we are, and we are learning through history, now being brought out, how bad things were for some Aboriginals, it takes all sides to fix that, not just throwing money, read Tom Wills story , its an eye opener and barely about the VFL, TOO MANY PEOPLE OUT THERE FINDING SOMETHING TO ARGUE ABOUT INSTEAD OF LEARNING TOGETHER TO BE WHAT WE ARE AUSTRALIANS.

That's enough I'm done.
 

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Sainteric said:
Captain cook sailed on a little boat half way round the world as more or less an explorer and ended up being killed by other pacific natives. Not sure why stan gives him a bad rap. These rewrites of history are getting farcical all white people are bad.
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The rewrite that he didn't actually 'discover' Australia? The fact that it wasn't terra nullius with Aboriginals being here for maybe 50k years before he turned up? Also that other Europeans (Hartog, Tasman etc,) as well as other Asians had been here earlier.

Don't conflate that with some 'hate the whitey' BS. Its about facts. Not just the history of the power of one nationality.

26th January represents British Colonisation. Australia really became a nation on 1st January 1901. Thats the real Australia day, when it ceased to be just a collection of British colonies. The actual date for a BBQ & piss up to celebrate our actual nationhood can be any date really. Any except 26th January that is.
 
madmug said:
26th January represents British Colonisation. Australia really became a nation on 1st January 1901. Thats the real Australia day, when it ceased to be just a collection of British colonies. The actual date for a BBQ & piss up to celebrate our actual nationhood can be any date really. Any except 26th January that is.
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When it ceased to be a collection of British colonies it effectively became a single British overseas territory. Plenty has changed between 1901 and today. I was born in 1984 and I'm fairly sure I'm not a 'British Subject'.

While our head of state is still some old bint in a castle on the other side of the glove we are never truly independent, IMO.
 
Not only did he not discover Australia, he wasn't even the first European to see it.

He was a talented sailor/captain who left a lifetime's work behind, but the place for the dick sucking is museums in England. ******* hell, he died a lifetime before Australia's second biggest city was founded!
 
Cook should be memorialised for his actual achievements, and there were many, rather than for any colonial myths.

It's a pity that even those defending his statue know so little about them.
 
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