Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

provided by

This black-and-white clip shows Russell Grimwade describing the erection of a monument in Great Ayton, Yorkshire, England, to replace the family cottage of Captain James Cook, which was relocated to Melbourne, Australia, in 1934. Footage of Point Hicks, of the Cape Everard lighthouse, of the monument and plaque commemorating Cook’s sighting of Point Hicks and of cutting the granite blocks for the monument is accompanied by Grimwade’s voice-over narration. The clip concludes with scenes of the cottage’s relocation site in Melbourne’s Fitzroy Gardens and of the cottage in its original location in England.

Educational value points

• Captain James Cook (1728–79), English navigator, explorer and cartographer, whose family’s cottage is shown in the clip, was the first to chart the eastern coastline of Australia in 1770. Cook claimed possession of the eastern coast of the continent for Britain. Cook was an outstanding seaman and innovative captain who led a number of dangerous exploratory voyages into uncharted waters around Australia, New Zealand and Hawaii. He was also admired for actively protecting the health of his crews through provision of an improved diet at a time when many sailors lost their lives due to scurvy.

• The cottage was originally built by Cook’s parents in the Yorkshire village of Great Ayton in 1755 as James Cook was commencing his career in the Royal Navy, and it is likely that Cook never lived in it. After Australian Sir Wilfred Russell Grimwade purchased the cottage in 1933 it was dismantled brick by brick, each component was numbered and it was shipped in crates and barrels to Victoria, where it was carefully reconstructed. Over time, the building has been authentically restored and refurbished with techniques and materials appropriate to its origins.

• Captain Cook’s cottage is one of Melbourne’s most popular cultural heritage sites, visited annually by large numbers of Australian and international tourists alike. Located in Melbourne’s Fitzroy Gardens, visitors to the cottage often misunderstand it to have been the place where Cook lived when he first visited Australia in 1770, when in fact the area was uninhabited by Europeans at the time and Cook never mapped the coastline around or landed anywhere near the area now known as Melbourne.

• Sir Wilfred Russell Grimwade (1879–1955) was a member of one of Victoria’s best-known families. The Grimwade family has been prominent in the business, arts and medical communities of Melbourne and its members are well-known philanthropists. Russell Grimwade was appointed a Commander of the British Empire in 1935 and knighted in 1950 in recognition of his contribution to society.

• Sir Russell Grimwade’s gift of Cook’s cottage to the people of Victoria in 1934 to commemorate the centenary anniversary of the settlement of Melbourne demonstrates two of Grimwade’s passions: collection and conservation. Grimwade was a visionary in his understanding of the importance of preserving history. He was also passionate about the arts, education and science, conceiving grand plans in many of his roles as benefactor, inventor, manufacturer, naturalist and patron.

• Perspectives on Australia’s history have changed since the production of this clip in 1933. Until the second half of the 20th century, Cook was revered as the 'discoverer’ of Australia. This came to be regarded as a colonial conceit when the presence of Indigenous Australian peoples and the explorations by Dutch and Portuguese sailors prior to Cook’s visit became widely acknowledged. Cook’s presumption that Australia was terra nullius, uninhabited land, was subsequently overturned by the High Court in its 1992 Mabo decision.

• Point Hicks, the wild and windy Victorian promontory shown in the clip, was the first piece of land to be sighted by Lieutenant Zachary Hickes on Cook’s 1770 voyage, and may have been the first part of the east coast sighted by Europeans. Cook named the point after Hickes and recorded its location in his log, but it was not identified by later explorers, who renamed it. It was known as Cape Everard from 1843 until 1970 when the point was confirmed as Hickes’s 'discovery’ and its first European name returned, albeit with slightly different spelling.

This clip starts approximately 1 minute into the documentary.

Titles read ‘Mr Russell Grimwade tells of the purchase of Captain Cook’s cottage, and the erection of a monument in its place at Great Ayton, Yorkshire, England’. The first shot is a man in a suit and hat talking to camera. The second shot is a montage of footage of men at the location of the monument, men extracting the stone from the site and loading it into the ship. The final shot is of the cottage.

Russell Grimwade When Victoria bought the home of Captain Cook’s father and decided to remove it from the little village of Great Ayton in Yorkshire and ship it to Melbourne as a centenary event, the good people of Yorkshire were rather resentful at the loss of an historical building which had been for many years an object of great interest to all visitors. We have no wish to do anything that will in anyway sever the bonds of friendship existing between the great County of Yorkshire and our own State. Therefore, we sought a means of appeasing the resentment felt at the removal of the cottage. It has been decided that the best way to do that would be to erect on the site of the cottage, in Yorkshire, a facsimile of the monument to James Cook which stands at Cape Everard within a few miles of Point Hicks, the first part of the Australian coast to be sighted by the great explorer. To ensure that the gift would be a perfect reproduction of the original monument, the actual granite blocks were hewn from the stone at the spot only 30 yards from the monument, which marks the first sighting of Australian land by the great navigator. Close by is the Cape Everard lighthouse, one of the lonely outposts on the Australian coast. It is approached either from land or the coast by a sandy track through tea tree and honeysuckle scrub. The locality is snake infested, and one of the party is obliged to carry a good stick in case of emergency. It is 30 miles from the nearest habitation on the Princes Highway in Gippsland. Four times a year, the good ship Cape York of the Commonwealth Lighthouse Services visits the lighthouse and it was on one of these visits that we were able, with the cooperation of the Navigation Department, to secure this pictorial record of the historical piece of land which was first sighted on 20 April 1770 by the chief officer of Captain Cook’s ship Endeavour, Lieutenant Zachary Hicks, whose name is engraved upon the monument. Captain J.K. Davis, Commonwealth Director of Navigation, is seen amongst the granite blocks ready to be removed. 39 of these stones, weighing half a tonne each, had to be shipped during the period that the Cape York could remain at the jetty. Time and tide wait for no man, but the resourceful sailors had charge of the operation and by 6 o’clock in the evening, every stone was safely placed in the ship in measurable distance of being landed on the shores of old England in due course. The last stone was loaded not more than half an hour before the ship had to clear out from a lee shore to the safety of deep waters. Victoria will be the richer in historical possessions when, on this fenced-in spot of the beautiful Fitzroy Gardens, Melbourne, the home of that great navigator, Captain Cook, will find a resting place where it will surely be honoured by generations of Australians proud of the pioneers who made possible the establishment of their great heritage, Australia.