Scribner Australia

Warra Warra Wai

$34.99

How Indigenous Australians discovered Captain Cook, and what they tell about the coming of the Ghost People

For the first time, the First Nations story of Cook’s arrival, and what blackfellas want everyone to know about the coming of Europeans.

Both 250 years late and extremely timely, this is an account of what First Nations people saw and felt when James Cook navigated their shores in 1770.

We know the European story from diaries, journals and letters. For the first time, this is the other side. Who were the people watching the Endeavour sail by? How did they understand their world and what sense did they make of this strange vision? And what was the impact of these first encounters with Europeans? The answers lie in tales passed down from 1770 and in truth-telling of the often more brutal engagements that followed.

Darren Rix (a Gunditjmara-GunaiKurnai man, radio reporter and Archie Roach’s nephew) and his co-author Craig Cormick travelled to all the places on the east coast that were renamed by Cook, and listened to people’s stories. With their permission, these stories have been woven together with the European accounts and placed in their deeper context: the places Cook named already had names; the places he ‘discovered’ already had peoples and stories stretching back before time; and although Cook sailed on, the empire he represented impacted the people’s lives and lands immeasurably in the years after.

‘Warra Warra Wai’ was the expression called to Cook and his crew when they tried to make landfall in Botany Bay. It has long been interpreted as ‘Go away’, but is perhaps more accurately translated as ‘You are all dead spirits’. In adding the First Nations version of these first encounters to the story of Australian history, this is a book that will sit on Australian shelves alongside Cook’s Journals, Dark Emu and The Fatal Shore as one of our foundational texts.

About the authors

Darren Rix, a Gunditjmara-GunaiKurnai man with Ngarigo bloodlines, grew up in the tin huts and tents of ‘Silver City’, South Nowra, with his eleven siblings. His family later got their first house in the Bega Valley, and he attended school in Bega. At fourteen, Darren moved to Ngunnawal country – Canberra – to which he has songline ties through his Ngarigo bloodlines. He has worked as a radio reporter for the Brisbane Indigenous Media Association, and with the Ngunnawal people as a cultural sites officer in Canberra. Darren is an accomplished musician, as was his uncle, Archie Roach. He has appeared in the TV program Rake. Darren has six children and twelve grandchildren.

Dr Craig Cormick OAM is an award-winning author and science communicator. He has published many more books than he has children and grandchildren (and he has four and three of those respectively). He was born on Dharawal Country – Wollongong – and has lived in the Blue Mountains and Queensland. He currently lives on Ngunnawal land in Canberra. He has been Chair of the ACT Writers Centre, co-host of the literary podcast Secrets from the Green Room, and has edited several magazines and books. He is drawn to stories of people whose voices have been hidden from history.

'You will close this book feeling closer to your country.' – Bruce Pascoe, author of Dark Emu

'Rix and Cormick started with a supposedly "simple idea" but the result is complex, subtle, surprising and poignant … Warra Warra Wai is a triumph of collaborative truth-telling.' – Kate Fullagar, author of Bennelong and Phillip

'A fascinating exploration of the view from both the ship and the shore … Warra Warra Wai is told with freshness, gentle humour and empathy … The land itself begins to sing to us all.' – Jeff McMullen, journalist, author, filmmaker

Darren Rix, Craig Cormick
Published September 2024
Paperback
352 pages
234 x 153 mm
ISBN 9781761424021