The fateful shore

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This was published 14 years ago

The fateful shore

Cook's journey ... Point Hicks Lighthouse.

Cook's journey ... Point Hicks Lighthouse.Credit: Oliver Strewe/Lonely Planet

Our collars and coats flap in salted air and water foams between rocks. The three of us squint in dull morning light at an empty horizon and try to imagine how it looked all those years ago, when the Endeavour heaved into view.

In 1770, James Cook said: "... the Southernmost Point of land we had in sight ... I have named it Point Hicks, because Leuitt Hicks was the first who discover'd this land."

Here we stand under sullen skies on April 20, an anniversary of the voyagers' arrival. We want to see what they saw: the rocks, the trees, the waves, the light, the stars, the shape of the land. We lean into the wind. Fur seals corkscrew in a heaped sea.

"Sometimes there's no one here," says Rob Coates, who has lived for 12 years at Point Hicks in the lighthouse keeper's cottage. "People visit to take photos and see the place. They don't really come because it's anything to do with Cook."

Not us. This holiday, in rhyming slang, is for a Captain Cook at the places the explorer put on the map - from first sighting to stepping ashore at Sting Ray Harbour, where able-bodied seaman Forby Sutherland died, probably of tuberculosis. It was soon renamed Botany Bay.

Along the way there's a peak named after a one-humped camel, a point of colonial divide, games of mini-golf and enough fried fish to keep a man happy for a week. It's all linked by a geography of first contact.

This begins at Point Hicks, a mustard-coloured granite knuckle in far eastern Victoria where a damp wind scuds in from the south-west, funnelled through Bass Strait. Bull kelp tangles on the shore. Rain squalls send us scampering. We stay two nights. It rains three days.

"It's pretty busy most of the time, except for a couple of months during winter," says Coates.

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Both assistant keepers' weatherboard cottages are booked when we visit, so we stay instead in a converted storeroom behind the light tower, the tallest on mainland Australia. Days are filled with cups of coffee and tea, and collecting driftwood. The tower blinks into the night, once every 10 seconds. A concrete obelisk erected in 1925 first formally recognised this historic footnote. It was marked then as Cape Everard (as it still is on our road map), a toponym assigned by John Stokes on an 1843 coastal survey. The 1890 lighthouse is known also as Cape Everard, winking 26nautical miles out to sea.

The former Victorian premier, Sir Henry Bolte, changed the maps in 1970 for the Cook Bicentenary. He visited the site, unveiled a stone cairn, opened the Captain James Cook National Park and declared: "This spot shall henceforth be known as Point Hicks."

It's from here we take bearings from a compass rose on the cairn. The South Pole is 3496miles (5626kilometres) south. Melbourne is 235miles (380kilometres) west. Botany Bay is 287 miles (460kilometres) north-north-east. It's good to know where you're going.

A cormorant glides in a stiff wind towards Rame Head, 19kilometres to the east and the second landmark Cook charted. "This point rises to a round hillock very much like the Ramhead going into Plymouth sound, on which account I called it by the same name," he wrote.

I don't visit, only because we needed a chainsaw to lop through a fallen tree limb when driving back to the Princess Highway. We dragged other branches aside. The 46-kilometre trip took more than two hours. So I take a shorter turnoff instead to Genoa Peak to seek perspective on the landscape. A sign at the car park says the lookout walk is twohours' return. "Moderate fitness required. Steep grades." I jog-trot to the pink granite boulders and climb steel ladders to the top. The view is astonishing. I am literally breathless.

To the north there's Mount Wog Wog (1139metres) and Mount Imlay (886metres) in NSW and in the south a ribbon of wilderness coast with features including Rame Head, Mallacoota Inlet and the topographical full stop of Gabo Island. On April 21, 1770, Cook had noted "a small Island lying close to a point". This is it.

On the same day he viewed the country and considered it "very agreeable and promising". Cook commented on a land "of moderate height diversified with hills, ridges, planes and Vallies with some few small lawns, but for the most part the whole was cover'd with wood ... "

The wood Cook saw was stringybark, grey gum, messmate and bloodwood and from this rocky knoll it spreads seemingly forever. What he saw was home to the Krauatungalung people. This is their country; it's now mostly Croajingolong National Park. Cook was its first sightseer.

At Mallacoota I walk among shell middens, startle wonga pigeons and at night slurp a bowl of homemade rice noodles with local tinned abalone, cooked by a woman from southern China. Her name is Lucy and Lucy's Noodle Bar is a culinary delight of the trip. The shop also rents videos and sells antiques.

In a fresh westerly gale with rain showers, Cook observed a "point I have named Cape Howe". The Endeavour's 42-year-old lieutenant in command had named one of this land's furthest limits. He reckoned it "may be known by the Trending of the Coast". Cook had rounded the country's southeast corner, a point later used from which to rule a line to create the colony of Victoria.

East of Mallacoota, the land dips from Howe Hill to the cape that Cook named after Admiral Earl Howe, then to Gabo Island where the lighthouse stands like a flagpole. It looks a wild place, as any end of the world should.

The three-masted Endeavour sailed north from here, where Cook "saw the smook of fire in several places a certain sign that the Country is inhabited". It doesn't seem likely between Genoa and Eden. I lose FM radio reception. Forests encroach. At the border I stop and make a puddle in two states. Not one car interrupts my bladder relief.

Passing the Blue Marlin Motor Inn at Eden I wonder how Cook missed Twofold Bay. But he did, so I drive further north via Bega and Bermagui to Mount Dromedary, the first summit the explorer named along the east coast, "on account of its figure".

But I don't see the granite tors of the camel's hump. The peak of this ancient volcano is wrapped in a scrim of grey mist. Water dances silver down its foothills. Signposts say the 11-kilometre return walk takes five hours. It's getting late but I set off anyway, jogging in the rain with no torch.

Beyond the saddle I turn back shy of the 800-metre summit and descend in darkness. My clothes and sneakers are sodden. At the car I strip down and see both ankles ringed in blood. I pluck off seven leeches. The bites itch for weeks.

Beneath the clouds I do see other landforms noted by Cook. "The shore under the foot of this Mountain forms a point which I have named Cape Dromedary over which is a peaked hillick." This is Little Dromedary.

Further north it's a broken journey. At Depot Beach in Murramarang National Park, a track leads up into a spotted gum and burrawang forest. From here I branch off and pick through spiderwebs and banksias to the tip of an alarmingly high headland. "At 5 oClock we were abreast of a Point of land which on account of its perpendicular clifts I call'd Point Upright," wrote Cook of my whereabouts.

Further north is Pigeon House Mountain and Cape St George, so named because Cook had " ... discover'd it on that Saints day". Port Kembla on the tip of Red Point follows, put on the map because " ... the land about it appeared of that colour".

The journey ends as it begins, on a point in a national park by an obelisk to Cook and a simple monument. This one is capped in white marble and in a corner of Kurnell commemorates Forby Sutherland, "the first British subject to die in Australia". Sydney glimmers in the distance beyond the container cranes of Port Botany.

On the fine, white sand of Silver Beach I change into togs and wade out by the sandstone shelf where the Endeavour's crew first came ashore. I take a deep breath in the shallows, plunge under and swim out into the bay.

Looking back on the beach where the English tourists arrived, I think of it as a place where two worlds collided. It was here Cook offered nails and beads to the locals, looked for fresh water, found "a few Small hutts made of the bark of trees" and fired his musket. He stepped ashore and a whole new story was to begin.

FAST FACTS

Getting there

It took 11 days for the Endeavour to sail from Point Hicks to Botany Bay. A self-drive James Cook tour on this leg needs about a week, depending on the weather and how close you travel to each landmark. Pigeon House Mountain, for example, is a steep four-hour return walk, Cape Howe requires a boat trip, an overnight hike and a permit. Both can be seen from other vantages.

Staying there

Point Hicks Lighthouse: the assistant keepers' cottages cost from $230 a night, midweek, for six people in low season. We bunked down in the perfectly shipshape bungalow for $80 a night for two. Bookings on www.gippslandlakesescapes.com.au/Properties/PointHicksLighthouse or phone (03) 5156 0432.

To read a literal transcript of James Cook's Journal Of Remarkable Occurrences Aboard His Majesty's Bark Endeavour, 1768-1771, see southseas.nla.gov.au. A worthwhile edited version with explanatory notes can be found at ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/c/cook/james/c77j.

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