[Captain Cook):(Re-Births):(Byron Bay]

Abstract

‘[Captain Cook):(Re-Births):(Byron Bay]’ is a re-imagining of the Endeavour’s famous voyage of discovery up the east coast of Australia in 1770, particularly in relation to its sighting of the Northern Rivers region of New South Wales. Its key question asks how the highly contextualised semantic order Cook brought to the region is related to the kind of order discernible in Byron Bay and the surrounding area today. In essence, does Cook’s naming of Cape Byron (and subsequently, the locality that clings to it – Byron Bay), and the Northern River’s most significant landscape feature – Mount Warning (remembering that both these acts of naming were carried out from the context of the Endeavour’s oceanic perspective), still have some resonance today? How might this prominent voyage of discovery be recast, or is its legendary status set in stone? Might it be possible for those resident in the region (and possibly elsewhere) to become electronic avatars of the ship’s celebrated captain, perhaps Joseph Banks, maybe one of the ship’s crew, or even one of the on-shore Aborigines of the period, to see if we could (both personally and collectively) re-imagine a different semantic order for the landscape and culture of the Northern Rivers, now as much a global region as a national one? Indeed, is this semantic re-imagining possible for the whole continent of Australia itself?