I am currently putting together a book on James Cook’s First Voyage.

The idea of it is to look at the voyage in relation to: 1. the Doctrines of Discovery 2. Potential British motivations 3. The mass theft of documents the British made in Manila (ie. what the British secretly knew). 4. The geopolitical context especially with respect to Dutch claims over “New Holland”. 5. The available navigational technology available during different eras. Yes – the same kind of thing that I sometimes blog about, but I want to put it in a book, with some kind of structure (unlike my blog which kind of jumps about all over the place) and focusing on Cook’s first voyage.

This will be unlike any book ever written about Cook’s first voyage. Because I have found details that have been sitting there – right in front of everyone noses in Cook’s journals and charts – that no one seems to have noticed. You know – all those little odd details that seem out of place – like the location of Point Hicks. Most Cook authors just skip over it like it’s nothing. For me – I want a explanation. I think previous authors have been caught up and overly influenced by previous books on Cook – such as Beaglehole’s – that they have failed to step back and see the forest for the trees. Most authors also have so much respect for Cook that they cannot envisage him making mistakes or being outright deceptive. This is kind of ridiculous given the cloak-and-dagger way colonialism functioned in practice. I have taken a different approach by concentrating firstly on the primary sources, on the doctrines of discovery and how they operate in practice by looking at how it worked in other parts of the world, and using satellite imagery to recreate the path of different voyages (not just Cook’s).

I have never written a book before, so I don’t know how long it’s going to take. I know it will be a lot different from a blog where I can just write about random stuff I find when I find it. At the moment, I got an idea of what I want to put in the book, but I am not sure of the structure yet.

I’m tossing up between a non-fiction narrative style (which reads like a novel – a bit more creative, and hopefully entertaining to read with an attempt at character development) or a strait-up chronological run-down of history (not as fun to read, dry, but potentially more comprehensive and closer to the truth). I’ve already put together outlines for both styles and have started to fill them out. I think a narrative style book will be a real page turner if I can successfully pull it off… But I’m kind of a stickler for including all the minutia I have found that support my hypothesis. A lot of that minutia will have to be tossed in a narrative style because it will bog down the flow of the story.

The really important thing about this book – and why I want to write it – is that I think there is currently an attempt to rewrite Australian history but in a very misleading way. Under this new history, Aboriginal people were never colonised. Aboriginal people were simply people of an earlier wave of settlement. It may be that they were not even the first wave – if the ridiculous “pygmy hypothesis” gets picked into the mainstream narrative (I think this may happen – given enough time). The new history narrative is simply false. By examining Cook’s voyage in the way I will in this book will prove that we were colonised, how we were colonised (because it happened a bit differently than in other parts of the world) and that we are under colonial occupation to this day. This book will be a preemptive strike against the new history narrative. From a practical political standpoint, right now it doesn’t even matter if we are not the first people (we are!)… what matters is we are under colonial occupation and that entails special rights for self determination under a decolonial context.

So maybe I will not blog as much now as I focus on the book. But during my research I am still finding new surprising things which I can’t help but share…. in that case I might still drop a blog post here and there.