Honourable colonisation? Australia

On Australia Day, 26 January 2014, news sites ran the story of ‘Australia’s shame!’ Captain Cook’s Cottage, situated in Melbourne’s leafy Fitzroy Gardens, had been spray-painted in bold black letters across its stone walls with the graffiti ‘26th Jan Australia’s shame’ and ‘F*** Australia Day’. The small stone cottage, constructed in 1755, had been transported from North Yorkshire and transplanted to Melbourne in 1933, and trimmed with an English garden. Since then the site had become a popular tourist attraction, possessing a shrine-like and symbolic presence, marking James Cook’s ostensible ‘discovery’ of Australia in 1770, an event which augured the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788 and the subsequent colonisation of Australia.

This latest graffiti incident was claimed by the anarchist blog ‘Disaccords’, which argued online that the denial of Australia’s ‘brutal’ history was nowhere more evident than on Australia Day. ‘This is why we trashed the absurd shrine to genocide, Captain Cook’s Cottage, with paint’, the bloggers declared.