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‘Of Rabbits and Pirates: After-Images of E. Philips Fox’s ‘Landing of Captain Cook at

Botany Bay, 1770’

GOLNAR NABIZADEH*

Abstract This paper explores the role of fantasy in E. Phillips Fox’s historical painting, ‘Landing of

Captain Cook at Botany Bay 1770’ (1902) through two contemporary adaptations of the work in The

Rabbits (1998) by John Marsden and Shaun Tan, and Daniel Boyd’s painting, ‘We Call Them Pirates

Out Here’ (2006). Although markedly different in terms of their material production and aesthetic

approach, the adaptations of ‘Landing of Captain Cook’ recapitulate its colonial fantasy by displacing

the hyper-real contents of the original with surrealistic and pop elements, respectively. I suggest that

as ‘after-images’, these adaptations usefully complicate the signification of ‘Cook’ and in so doing,

engage with dialogues about how ‘Australia’ is constituted, and how it might be imagined. In this

sense, the adaptations consciously draw out the fantasy of ‘Australia’ in the original through their later

aesthetic permutations.

Keywords Phillips Fox, Captain Cook, fantasy, Australia, adaptation, Daniel Boyd, Shaun Tan.

INTRODUCTION1

The Rabbits (1998) by John Marsden and Shaun Tan, and Daniel Boyd’s painting, ‘We Call Them Pirates Out Here’ (2006) offer playful and creative adaptations of the historical paint-ing, ‘Landing of Captain Cook at Botany Bay 1770’ (1902) by E. Phillips Fox (Figure 1). ‘Landing of Captain Cook’ depicts a colonial fantasy about a ‘foundational moment’ in modern Australian history. Although markedly different in terms of their material produc-tion and aesthetic approach, the adaptations of ‘Landing of Captain Cook’ recapitulate its colonial fantasy by displacing the hyper-real contents of the original with surrealistic and pop elements, respectively. In this way, the adaptations consciously draw out the fantasy of the original through their later aesthetic permutations, and in doing so, reshape its contours.

I use the term ‘fantasy’ as Freud does, where a conscious or unconscious fantasy reveals not only a desire for a person or object, but also a yearning to be recognised as desirable in response.2 I suggest that through this double relation, the colonial fantasy in ‘Landing of Captain Cook’ is not only located in the constructed vision of Cook’s landing as a kind of screen memory against a more vexed history, but is also located in the way it draws the viewer into the scene. Cook looks ‘out’ of the painting rather than meeting the gaze of the viewer (Figure 1).

*English and Cultural Studies, The University of Western Australia. E-mail: golnar.nabizadeh@uwa.edu.au.

Adaptation Vol. 9, No. 1, pp. 35–45doi:10.1093/adaptation/apu049Advance Access publication 4 March 2015

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In this way, the visual sequencing of the work creates a broken circuit, where Cook does not look at the people looking at him—whether they be the other figures on the canvas or the viewer—but instead looks away and ‘into’ history. I suggest that this inter-rupted visual circuit is critical to the way that this scene demarcates Australia’s imagined future from its imagined past, whereby the landing of Cook and his crew is constructed as an inaugurating moment of a modern nation. In revisiting this originary scene, the adap-tations by Shaun Tan and Daniel Boyd explore some of the valences of this fantasy—including Cook’s disavowal of the local men—through the creation of fictional parallel worlds where Cook is alternatively figured as a rabbit and a pirate. As ‘after-images’, these adaptations usefully complicate the signification of ‘Cook’ and in so doing, engage with dialogues about how ‘Australia’ is constituted, and how it might be imagined.

Whereas in the original work, Cook’s landing is represented as a dignified procession along the shore, and into the pages of history, in Boyd’s adaptation the artist depicts this inaugurating moment as a breach of Aboriginal sovereignty and, in so doing, reimagi-nes the ontological status of Cook: not a fearless agent of the British crown, but a pirate intruding on another territory (Figure 2).

Boyd takes the title of his painting, ‘We Call Them Pirates Out Here’ from the Wes Anderson film, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004), and the painting is similarly infused with a pop sensibility. Boyd was motivated to paint this work after learning about the National Portrait Gallery’s purchase of RN Webber’s portrait of Captain Cook in 2000 for 5.3 million dollars (Nugent 134). The material value placed on this portrait of Cook reaffirms the importance of his name and status to maintaining the transmission of an Australian colonial fantasy.

On the other hand, Shaun Tan’s adaptation is found in the picture book, The Rabbits (1998), which he illustrated to John Marsden’s writing. The book depicts the conquest of a land and the subjugation of its inhabitants by a foreign species. The narrative depicts a partly allegorical encounter between marsupial like creatures that resemble numbats, and

Figure 1 E. Phillips Fox, ‘Landing of Captain Cook at Botany Bay, 1770’ (1902). Australian 1865–1915, worked in France 1901–13. Landing of Captain Cook at Botany Bay, 1770 (1902). Oil on canvas. 192.2 × 265.4 cm. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Gilbee Bequest, 1902.

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white rabbits who arrive by sea to the land inhabited by the numbats. Although the story proceeds in a linear fashion, its temporal progression is truncated on several occasions to include references to the longer-term traumas that the arrival of the rabbits inflicts on the numbats, such as war, the erasure of traditional subsistence, and generations of stolen children. The surreal construction of the world of the text draws attention to the con-structed nature of representations, and the use of myths to power the colonial machine.

The cultural milieu within which The Rabbits and ‘We Call Them Pirates Out Here’ were produced is one marked by upheavals in Australia’s self-perception, characterised in landmark policy and legal directions. There were sustained challenges to particular ideologies, which legitimated the foundation, funding, and actions of the Australian nation. For example, the groundswell of concern and outrage about the state of Indigenous welfare, rights, and values, while recognised in Mabo,3 was perhaps epito-mised some time later in Bringing them Home, a report on the separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their parents, which was published in 1997.

While the Federal Government’s apology to the Stolen Children Generation would not be delivered until ten years after The Rabbits was published, and one year after Boyd produced ‘We Call Them Pirates Out Here’, the questions raised by The Rabbits, includ-ing its final lament, ‘Who will save us from the rabbits?’, speaks to these landmark tran-sitions in the recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander rights and welfare. These transitions reveal themselves not only through formal policies and instruments, but in shifts in choices around representation and the evolving terrain of cultural desires.

As part of this consideration, understanding ‘Cook’ as a complex signifier allows con-trapuntal narratives to emerge as we think through the manifold legacies of Australian colonialism. Indeed, Chris Healy has suggested that Cook’s name ‘can be considered a term which creates a possibility of dialogue between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal ways of making histories’ (n.p.). As Katrina Schlunke observes, though he figures as

Figure 2 Daniel Boyd, ‘We Call Them Pirates Out Here’ (2006). Oil on canvas. Museum of Contemporary Art, purchased with funds provided by the Coe and Mordant families, 2006. Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney © the artist.

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‘The Great Navigator, The Original Invader, The Marker of Modern Australia and The Discoverer’ (43), considering Cook outside these well-worn narratives lets us produc-tively explore not only his part in our colonial legacies but also what it means that ‘there was, and is, a “before Cook”’ (44). In this view, the adaptations under discussion extend contemporary perspectives of Cook by reimagining him in not only different guises—as a pirate or as a rabbit—but also in terms of his symbolic significance as part of the mythos of Australian colonialism. This paper responds to both Healy’s and Schlunke’s suggestions by exploring the creative iterations of his image in three very different works.

CREATING CAPTAIN COOKCook’s arrival in Botany Bay is only one strand of the mythic networks that make up the foundation of white ‘Australia’, but it is a potent one. A year before Fox produced his painting, the Endeavour’s arrival was staged as part of celebrations heralding the nascent Australian Federation. Fox’s painting is thus part of a narrative chain that continues to reaf-firm and naturalise a colonial narrative that locates Cook as a ‘foundational national figure’. The work is impregnated with an aspirational quality captured in Cook’s outstretched arm, firm, and still amidst the activity that surrounds him. Aside from the fact of the Endeavour is pictured arriving in what would later become known as ‘Botany Bay’, the scene is entirely fictive. Maria Nugent rightly observes that in creating the painting of Captain Cook’s land-ing, Fox did not paint an accurate scene of the arrival of the Endeavour, but rather, combined particular elements to construct a foundational myth about the birth of a nation (24).

Fox completed the painting in 1902 in the wake of Federation, under commission by the National Gallery of Victoria. One of the conditions of the commission was that the painting must be completed outside Australia, so Fox sailed to London where he finished the work. The inclusion of ‘1770’ in the title historicised the landing as a landmark event. Though it is difficult to ascertain the immediate reception of the work, in the decades that followed the painting acquired an iconic status through its reproduction and circulation. The painting by Fox is remarkable for the frequency with which it has been reproduced in different forms on currency, stamps, commemorative decorations, children’s books and the like. With its ‘staged, frozen grandeur’ (Stathopoulos), Fox’s vision offers a markedly assured version of the Endeavour’s landing, appropriate for a founding myth, rather than emphasizing the hesitant and vexed arrival of the ship and its crew (Figure 1). The grand dimensions of the painting—192.2 × 265.4 cm—befit its symbolic function.

The viewer is meant to see this representation of colonial conquest as an epochal event—to see Cook’s landing as a point of origin for the notion of modern ‘Australia’, and so not to see it as a point of departure from the recognition of its precolonial his-tory. The division between past and future is clearly located within the alignment of Cook and his crew. Lieutenant Cook, as he was then, occupies the central space of the painting, the British Red Ensign flying almost directly behind him as it is held aloft by a young marine. The Swedish botanist Daniel Solander walks alongside the boy, his own arm partially raised in a gesture of uncertain exploration. All is a scene of activity as the Endeavour crew participate in the onshore arrival, their movements providing the com-positional scaffolding upon which Cook’s directive rests. Yet despite the onward march of the action, the painting captures elements of tension within its bounds.

Standing upright with an extended arm, Cook appears to be halting the violent action of the seamen who have pointed their muskets towards two figures in the background,

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his countenance grave and thoughtful. His gaze, however, is turned away from those fig-ures as he looks at and beyond the seamen. It runs almost parallel to his arm, arrested, as it were, in the contemplation of a teleological unfolding outside the present of the imme-diate scene. The distinct white of his breeches, unique to his figure, seems to confirm the conviction and authority with which his whole figure is charged. This is the promise of colonial Cook, a sure guide in establishing the ‘correct’ configuration of Australia.

In contrast, the figure of Joseph Banks, to Cook’s left, turns with uncertain entreaty towards the latter, his own extended arm aligned at a 90° angle to Cook’s, as he points to the local men, urging Cook to acknowledge the threat of violence.4 The bodies and gestures of the two men are aligned along perpendicular axes and this arrangement communicates the fundamental tension of this scene. As Nugent observes, the ‘oppos-ing signs made by Cook and Banks demonstrate the struggle between those who would champion the need for violence against Aboriginal people and those who would oppose or curtail it’ (33). That is, the central action of the painting is built around the contem-plation of violence towards the local men.

The local men are placed in the background, occupying a small proportion of the canvas surface, while Captain Cook and his men occupy a sizeable chunk of the fore-ground. One of the local men has a spear raised, but it is difficult to know whether this is a real or performative threat. The other man’s posture resembles that of Solander, the Swedish botanist, with a half-raised arm that is both tentative yet alert. It seems that, within the logic of the painting, the local men pose a real threat, justifying the aim of the marine’s musket. At least, this is what Cook’s men seem to believe, which makes Cook’s command against defensive action all the more noble.

Thus, as Nugent’s observations suggest, this scene presents another kind of violence. Neither Cook nor Banks—as the central actors of this scene—look at the men in the background, as their respective gazes are caught up in other motions. In this way, the scene simultaneously includes and excludes the local men from the painting’s narra-tive emphasis. Rather than omitting or repressing their presence entirely, the men are represented in the painting, only to be ignored by the leading actors in the mise-en-scène. Indeed, the scene activates a triangular visual loop, as the viewer looks from left to right ‘up’ the shore, across to the local men, and back to the central action. The viewer might read the scene’s progression from left to right as a metonym for the Australian colonial project’s march through time, with the local men facing backward towards the moment of arrival. Anne Brewster’s comment that the painting is designed to establish ‘an Australian beginning demarcated by [Indigenous and imperial] pasts’ (34) can also be understood as a demarcation predicated on colonial violence.

Boyd takes Fox’s painting and inverts its ‘legitimate’ colonial mission into an illegal enter-prise. In Boyd’s adaptation, the presence of ‘Pirate Cook’ with his eye patch, parrot, and ‘Jolly Jack’ flag in the background (Boyd’s neologism, combining ‘Jolly Roger’ with ‘Union Jack’) indicates the unlawful presence of the men on the shore and establishes an entirely different venture to Fox’s version of the arrival of the British. The young man bringing up the rear of the procession, behind the figure of Daniel Solander, bears the face of Boyd’s housemate, while the flag bearer bears the face of Boyd’s ‘girlfriend’s sister’s husband’ (Boyd). By using his friends and associates to populate the faces in his work, Boyd’s painting reinforces the idea that the moment of arrival in Fox’s painting is far from over, and that all ‘Australians’ are complicit in its continuation. The painting works against the disavowal of

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the local men by making ‘them’ the ‘we’ of Boyd’s vision, and this upends the fantasy of the original work by at least partially alienating Cook in his new guise as a Pirate.

Boyd also obliquely captures the violence of the disavowal towards the local men in the original work by replacing them with xanthorrhoea or ‘black boys’, as these grass trees were once problematically called. I agree with Maria Nugent’s observation that the conversion of the ‘local men’ into xanthorrhoea unsettles ‘naturalised (i.e., accepted) ways of seeing this past event, and of seeing or indeed not seeing Aboriginal people more generally’ (132). The artist has similarly explained that he chose to replace the local men with xanthorrhoea to convey the way that the British made ‘assumptions about Aboriginal culture’ (Boyd).

Removing the local men from the scene also disrupts the desiring loop of the origi-nal. Pirate Cook and his men are now only beheld by the viewer, and members of the local community are not visible. Instead, the presence of a local community is indirectly signified through the striking addition of white smoke in the background of the scene. Not only does this form of signification recognise the existence of local communities prior to the arrival of the pirates, it depicts the community as active and self-contained rather than being rendered visible as objects for consumption. Here the contours of the original fantasy have shifted—Cook and his crew are deprived of the local men’s atten-tion, and for this reason, some of the libidinal energy of the original is decathected in Boyd’s adaptation.

Considering the original work further, Fox’s depiction of Cook’s grave and assured presence does not convey the hesitations that the ‘real’ Cook and his crew members experienced in sailing along the coast of New Holland, in their attempts to reach shore. Nor was it meant to. As Nugent has explained, it would be incorrect to characterise Cook as a champion of nonviolent negotiations (82). Cook’s journal itself furnishes this evidence as it recounts the arrival of the Endeavour in the bay:

I thought that they [the local men] beckoned us to come ashore, but in this we were mistaken, for as soon as we put the boat in they again came to oppose us, upon which I fired a musket between the two which had no effect…one of them took up a stone and threw at us

(Cook’s Journal, 29 April 1770).

The encounter between Cook and the local men in this journal entry, where the firing of the musket seems to have ‘no effect’ on the latter, seems to be reflected in a similar lack of encounter in Fox’s painting. There is, however, a difference between the two texts because in the journal there is some exchange between the local men and Cook, however limited, whereas the painting frames all activity incidental to Cook’s out-stretched arm. Consequently, the painting represents a perspective that in substance, as well as form, privileges Western vision.

REINVENTING COOKThe codification of Cook as the discoverer of a nation ignores other renditions of his place in Australian history. As Chris Healy notes, ‘Aboriginal histories of Cook work with very different and distinctively creative formulations of time and place, of the con-nections between past and present and of the imperatives of cultural memory’ (n.p.). We encounter a contemporary iteration of this creative history in Boyd’s adaptation.

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The painting adopts the guise of an outsized postcard, reflecting Boyd’s initial encoun-ter with the original in this format. The proportions of this work (226 × 276 cm) eclipse that of Fox’s, with its title inscribed in the white gutter below the image, a layout fre-quently found in postcards, and the colours are brighter and flatter than in Fox’s origi-nal, in keeping with the values of popular or commercial art. Boyd commented that he used the postcard format across several of his paintings, adding that he wanted to send postcards to England to ‘show them the consequences of the things their empire had done’ (Boyd).

The title of Boyd’s painting—‘We Call Them Pirates Out Here’—tests the formal-ity of its Edwardian script (developed to mimic calligraphy). The ‘we’ standing behind this painting is different to the assumed ‘we’ of Fox’s painting, and, indeed, it is unclear who the ‘we’ of Boyd’s title are—perhaps they are members of the Indigenous popu-lation alone, or perhaps, more optimistically, they are both that population and also other Australians who accept their imbrication in the legacies of British colonialism in Australia. And so, unusually, Cook and his crew are cast as the ‘them’ of scene. Thus Boyd invites the viewer to consider the heroes of the original image recast as criminals. In this way, the work offers a parallel world in which the critical gaze is cast upon the new arrivals, whose presence on the land is precarious, if not illegal.

The stormy mottled grey clouds in the background, along with the loss of the yellow tint of the original, deprive this scene of its hallowed glow. Boyd stated that he wanted to paint this moment from an Indigenous perspective, using piracy as a tool to depict certain ideas about this moment in Australia’s history (Boyd). Thus Boyd’s adaptation modulates Cook’s symbolic status. As Chris Healy has noted, while ‘Cook did not bring Aboriginal people into history’, his arrival has come to signify the ‘beginning of an epoch’ (n.p.). Paintings like Boyd’s are important because they can enrich conversations about the structures of colonialism in Australia and their legacies.

As part of a broader cultural network, audiences can develop their ‘active role as critics of Australian history’ (Cartmell and Whelehan 17), by understanding the pro-duction of adaptations as self-conscious interventions in how the past is understood, and the future imagined. This creative reiteration is also evident in The Rabbits, with its rich and varied visual style. Tan combines and adapts influences from a range of inter-national and Australian artists, including Ralph Steadman, De Chirico, Max Ernst, Arthur Streeton, Brett Whiteley, and Sydney Nolan, among others. Tan has com-mented that works by these various painters ‘communicate in different ways with my own experience of a landscape that’s both lyrical and ambiguous, and epic in propor-tion’ (Stathopoulos). These qualities were also noted by Graeme Turner in his descrip-tion of Australian period films as works that foreground their Australianness through the ‘recreation of history and representations of the landscape; lyrically and beautifully shot…with atmospheric shots’ (100). Indeed, the Australian impressionism of Streeton in landmark paintings such as ‘Golden Summer, Eaglemont’ (1889) is particularly evi-dent in the lighting and delicately constituted landscape of the second double-page spread, ‘The meeting on the hill’ (Figure 3).

Tan’s representations of the landscape are similarly lyrical and atmospheric, while evincing an ambivalent relationship with its inhabitants. The brushwork here suggests a landscape teeming with life, and the textural element of the land communicates a density

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not easily displaced. In the scene above, the reader’s attention is drawn to the black or charcoal tracks left by the rabbit’s ‘steam punk’ styled machine in the background of the page. The depth of field asks the reader to contemplate the landscape, teeming with life that as yet has withstood the scorched-earth tracks left by the rabbits. Indeed, the distinctive charcoal lines seem to declare the way that colonial expansion and its ideo-logical underpinnings would carve up the land, ignorant of pre-existing familial and tribal groupings. Two animals—a beetle and a marsupial—have approached the tracks left by the machine, and the scene notes their presence as they investigate these marks. Tan has imprinted fingerprints in this landscape and they merge with the landscape, a trace and reminder of the human connection to land that also draws attention to the hand painted nature of the text. There are in fact fingerprints in almost all the scenes, embedded into the fabric of the image itself.

In other places, the ground-scapes conjure associations with Brett Whiteley’s work from the 70s such as ‘To Yirrawalla’ (1972), which was painted as a tribute to Yirrawalla, an artist, Aboriginal elder and spiritual leader of the Gunwinggu Tribe in Arnhem Land (Art Gallery of New South Wales). The most recognisable adaptation, however, is the recast-ing of Fox’s painting, in which Tan utilises the fundamental composition of this work in a markedly surreal setting to recode this image according to a new vision (Figure 4).

Like Boyd’s ‘Pirate Cook’, the rabbits that populate this scene are drawn against the austere representations of Cook and the Endeavour crew in Fox’s work. In Tan’s version, the British Red Ensign is replaced with a starburst against a red field. Mimicking the structure of the Union Jack, the arrows irradiating from the starburst’s centre symbolise the coloni-alising mission of the Captain and his crew. While Boyd chose to replace the local men in Fox’s painting with xanthorroea, Tan replaces the men with the local creatures that resemble numbats. As Tan has explained, ‘[t]he fact of Australia’s invasion by Europeans was…resource material in creating an entirely imaginary world, one which is parallel rather than symbolic’ (Stathopoulos). In other words, at the level of the symbolic, the rabbits do not stand in for British colonialists, nor do the numbats represent Australian Aborigines.

In Tan’s adaptation, the reader gazes upon the denatured rabbits, their ramrod straight backs seeming to lend an air of grotesque rigidity to their appearance. Their

Figure 3 Shaun Tan, ‘The Meeting on the Hill’. From Shaun Tan, ‘The Ship’. From The Rabbits by John Marsden and Shaun Tan, Lothian Children’s Books, an imprint of Hachette Australia, 1998.

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deep set eyes, with yellow sclera, and their pin feet suggest that they are ‘out of touch’ with their surrounds, although Tan takes care to depict one or two of them attempting to interact meaningfully with the numbats in other scenes. As Tan has commented, ‘[t]he rabbits themselves have no feet, their faces are as concealed as their intentions, and are literally two-dimensional’ (Stathopoulos). Their ominous presence in this adapta-tion is reinforced by their shadows, which cast longer and gloomier shadows over the land than in the original. Similar to Boyd’s version the bay and background are con-stituted in much darker tones than in Fox’s painting, while the golden light on the ship introduces a hallucinatory sheen to the work.

Looming over the bay sits Tan’s Endeavour, transformed into a beautifully alien struc-ture, with a knife-thin nose and vast number of sails. While the ship in Fox’s painting remains at a comfortable distance from the bay, in Tan’s version, it is brought over-whelmingly close to shore, and its magnified size supports the arrival of the rabbits as a disturbing and spectacular event. The straight lines that create the rabbits’ backs and ears contrast with the curved contours of the land, air, and water that surround them. The billowing clouds lend an air of crisis or apocalypse to the scene, which is presided over by the overpowering presence of the ship. Indeed, the vessel’s enormous prow is reminiscent of a Viking ship, which introduces overtones of military conquest and domination to the rabbits’ arrival. This element of aggression is, of course, present in Fox’s painting but acquires an inflated proportion here through the structure and place-ment of the ship. That is, in Tan’s adaptation, the dominance of the ship imbues the scene with a proleptic vision of the violence that would accompany the arrival of the British. Similarly, the deep shadows and exaggerated dimensions of the ship contribute to the nightmarish atmosphere of the scene, prefiguring the devastation to follow.

Through their exploratory considerations of ‘the past’, Tan’s and Boyd’s adaptations interrupt the fantasy of the original painting by literally presenting Cook, his crew, and the local inhabitants in new and productive ways. For example, in both adapta-tions the fantasised threat of violence from the local men is minimised, if not removed

Figure 4 Shaun Tan, ‘The Ship’. From The Rabbits by John Marsden and Shaun Tan, Lothian Children’s Books, an imprint of Hachette Australia, 1998.

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altogether. In doing so, they emphasise the arrival of the foreigners as a visual spectacle, as is the original, but now the spectacle is actively recognised as such, rather than being simply heralded as an iconic moment. These adaptations demonstrate the changing fields of desire as they produce different interpretations of what it means for Cook to ‘arrive’ in Botany Bay, and by extension, offer new modes of thinking about what his arrival meant and still means for how ‘Australia’ is imagined.

CONCLUSIONThe ability to reread the original in light of its adaptations means that the ‘processes of ideology’ can be critiqued (Cartmell and Whelehan 12). This critique is of particular benefit when considering a work of fantasy constructed between the desiring subject and its object. Through their respective aesthetic explorations, the adaptations of Fox’s painting by Tan and Boyd encourage viewers to identify the colonial fantasy of the original. As Chris Healy writes, ‘Western histories also have an in-built imperialism that tends to damn all alternatives as inferior and, with such arrogant assumptions, to restrict the possibilities of historical imagination to that which is already known’ (n.p.). One of the effects of adaptations, then, is to enliven epistemological alternatives that would otherwise remain flattened under the weight of popular ideology.

The remediation of the Fox’s painting following its production attests to the ways in which Cook’s status as the ‘discoverer of a nation’ gained ascendancy over time through the circulation of such works as part of a broader agenda to establish Cook as an iconic figure. Far from being a simple process, however, this status was contested from the begin-ning by Indigenous Australians. The adaptations under discussion have also contributed to discussions about Cook’s status to create further insights into the construction of an Australian cultural icon. It is noteworthy that the artists who have created the adaptations would have not been afforded full recognition as ‘Australians’ in the not-too-distant past—Boyd is an Indigenous artist, and although Tan was born in Western Australia, his father is of Chinese descent. By reimagining the scene of Cook’s arrival Tan and Boyd’s respective paintings challenge the colonial fantasy in Fox’s work. Each reinscription also promotes a broader consideration of how the foundational myths about ‘Australia’ were established, and more importantly, how they can be challenged and reshaped in the present.

Golnar Nabizadeh is an Honorary Research Fellow in English and Cultural Studies at The University of Western Australia, where she conducts research on trauma and memory studies, postcolonial literature, and visual culture. She has previously published on pedagogy and cultural studies in Cultural Studies Review, and on Alison Bechdel’s graphic narrative, Fun Home (2006). She has guest edited (with Mel Gibson and Kay Sambell) a special issue of the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics on childhood, picturebooks, and comics.

NOTES1 With thanks to Sam Hutchinson, Kieran Dolin, and Barbara Milech for their generous feedback on this article.2 See for example, Freud’s essay ‘A Child is Being Beaten’ and his discussion of ‘phantasy’ and Žižek’s later treatment of ‘fantasy’ in The Plague of Fantasies, p. 9.3 Mabo v Queensland (No. 2) (1992) 175 CLR 1.4 I am using the term ‘local men’ to describe Indigenous Australians, after Maria Nugent.

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