June 11, 1770. For Lieutenant James Cook, the end looms.

His ship the Endeavour has run aground on a reef. This man of the seas fears he will now be lost to it.

Cook sees his men grow desperate; hope is fading.

He dreads that in little time they will turn violently on each other.

Those who survive will anyway be dead to the world; what is left of their lives lost in a wilderness.

Cook's journal, counts every passing hour, his mood ever darker.

"...death has approached in all his terrors; and as the dreadful moment that was to determine our fate came on, everyone saw his own sensations pictured in the countenances of his companions..."

Cook's life, the lives of his crew, hang on the winds and the water.

Everything that could be spared is tossed overboard, with the load lighter and the tide rising, the vessel heaves into the deep water.

The crew that had slumped exhausted on deck, lift their spirits for a final effort.

All hands man the pump to hold the incoming flood at bay.

It is on these moments that history turns.

The first fleet

Captain James Cook's Endeavour journal 1768-1771. ( NLA )

To read Cook's words takes my breath away.

Here is a man far from his home, commanding a ship on a voyage to lands whispered of and imagined.

Through his words I see him; not a figure cast in bronze — a statue — but the man James Cook; a man of doubt and fear and perseverance and undoubted courage.

He had navigated the waters of the eastern coast of our continent, his maps recorded his journey.

On August 22, 1770, Cook claimed the whole of the territory at Possession Island, this land would now be known as New South Wales.

As an Indigenous person, my admiration for his feats is mixed with the reality that he looked upon my ancestors, in his words, as "some of the most rude and uncivilised upon the Earth".

The events his voyage set in train would prove devastating for my family; its legacy hangs heavily still in Indigenous lives today.

Speaking at this year's Garma festival, Indigenous leader Noel Pearson told of his ancestor's direct connection with Cook; indeed he was born in Cooktown.

He said it is too convenient to dismiss him as purely a villain.

This is my history. This is the history of all of us who call Australia home.

My mind goes back too, to another journey unrecorded in any log book.

It is written on the landscape, on cave walls; its trail uncovered today in fossilised remains. So ancient is this story.

It is the journey of a people completing that epic human trek out of Africa. These people had come as far as the Indonesian archipelago and now eyed another land in the distance: a final home.

Perhaps they saw smoke from wildfires, perhaps they kept moving because that's what people do. Something put them in boats to make what was then the first open sea journey in the history of humanity.

Somewhere lost in time the first footprints appeared on this soil.

Archaeological evidence now dates human occupation here from at least 65,000 years ago.

To the people who would create new cultures here, tell new stories, this time is not time at all; it is The Dreaming.

Sixty-five thousand years. It is easy to say but so daunting, so awe-inspiring to contemplate.

A total of 247 years of British possession; 65,000 years of the first people.

A new language

A sketch of a kangaroo, by Endeavour artist Sydney Parkinson ( Supplied: Natural History Museum, London )

This is my history. It is the blood of those first human explorers that runs through my veins.

It joins in me, too, with the blood of the Europeans.

What is part of me, is part of us all. It comes from this place.

The psychologist, Carl Jung, pondered the nature of the spirit of land; what he saw as a sacred thing.

"Land assimilates the conqueror," he said.

Two peoples here; two stories, two rivers, that meet.

As Cook patched up his stricken Endeavour he spent more than a month on the land of the Guugu Yimithirr.

Here one of the crew saw an odd animal: what was it, he asked. Ganguru.

He wrote it down as kangaroo.

A new word had entered English; a distinctively Australian word; a new language born on this soil.

There has been much discussion this week about another word: discovery.

A statue of Cook in Sydney's Hyde Park maintains that he "discovered this territory 1770".

I have questioned that, prompted to look at how we grapple with our history by America's violent struggle with its own.

Statues there — reminders of a racist past — are being pulled down.

I have never advocated the same here, but should we look upon his statue in silence, should our history be met with the shrug of indifference.

For me that is impossible.

Discovery is not merely a word, in Cook's time it was a doctrine.

From the 15th century it had been used by the empires of Europe to justify seizing the land of indigenous peoples.

Together with the doctrine of Terra Nullius — empty land — the rights of the First Peoples of this land were extinguished.

These doctrines are obsolete, our High Court in the Mabo decision acknowledged Native Title; that the peoples here at the time of Cook had and continue to possess a traditional and enduring legal right to their land.

The judges made it clear that this was not just a matter of law but a matter of history; it spoke to the soul of the nation.

Writing in their judgments Justices Deane and Gaudron characterised dispossession as a "legacy of unutterable shame".

"The nation as a whole must remain diminished unless and until there is an acknowledgment of and a retreat from those past injustices," they wrote.

The debate this week — 25 years after the Mabo decision — reminds us that the struggle for acknowledgment and a full reckoning remains unfinished.

Statues, plaques, inscriptions — these are symbols.

They are important because they tell us who we have been, they illustrate our story. But a nation is us; it is people.

Narrating the nation

Sorry, this video has expired Stan Grant says there needs to be a discussion about our history

This week we have questioned whether and how the events of two centuries ago should define us.

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The voices of Indigenous people are being heard.

We are asking ourselves: what is it to be an Australian?

The 19th century French Historian, Ernest Renan, in a famous essay said nations seek a "collective identity".

Nation, he wrote, is "a soul, a spiritual principle".

To Renan it was founded on "forgetfulness" as much as remembrance.

Unity is achieved by brutality but relieving grief, he wrote, "requires a common effort".

The philosopher, Homi Bhabha, sees this quest for nationhood as story-making, what he termed "narrating the nation".

We are a nation of grand traditions: the ancient and enduring place of the first peoples; the British legacy and the richness of our migrant story.

I am of the Wiradjuri and Kamilaroi. My story begins, too, in the hull of a convict ship and an Irishman in chains.

We rightly cherish the British inheritance, our rule of law and our robust democracy.

As a nation we have shown ourselves strong enough to meet the challenges of war, economic travail and political crisis.

We are a better country today than we were a generation ago and surely will be better still in a generation to come.

Balancing history

The Captain Cook statue in Hyde Park, Sydney. ( Wikimedia Commons: J Bar )

Still so much remains undone; histories untold.

Our rightful place remains unsettled.

Not everyone has an equal opportunity to shape this story of us.

Sociologist Catriona Elder, in her book Being Australian, writes:

"Issues of class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity and Indigeneity are all considered as factors that both shape how people experience being Australian and also shape the capacity of people to participate in formal venues where Australian-ness is produced."

Professor of Cultural Studies at Curtin University, Sevendrini Perera, has written of how whiteness in Australia has established a "hierarchy of belonging and entitlement".

Australian identity for many people remains one of contingency and ambivalence.

For Indigenous peoples shaped by conquest, colonisation and segregation; defined and re-defined by the state, Australian allegiance can be fraught.

Yet generations of Indigenous people have struggled for a way in; have balanced the legacy of a painful history with the need to make peace.

This year in the Uluru Statement from the Heart, Indigenous people spoke of the unbreakable link to this land.

"This link is the basis of the ownership of the soil, or better, of sovereignty," it said.

It reminded Australia that Indigenous sovereignty has never been ceded but co-exists with the sovereignty of the Crown.

"How could it be otherwise? That peoples possessed a land for sixty Millenia and this sacred link disappears from world history in merely the last two hundred years?"

These are the words of a people who have fought for survival.

The statement calls for an Indigenous voice in our Constitution, a document written more than a century ago specifically to exclude us.

Australians soon may be asked to vote yes.

I return to the words of Cook, stricken on the Great Barrier Reef.

The place where he had first struck peril he called Cape Tribulation.

He had feared the worst, yet had come through and he passed two small islands which at the height of his distress he had resigned himself to never reaching.

In his journal he wrote, "They had been the object of our hope, or perhaps rather our wishes, and therefore I called them HOPE ISLANDS."

We can still debate whether Captain Cook "discovered" this land — such debates are essential and hopefully elevated above hysteria and mocking — but reading Cook's words I can't help think he did put us on a journey between tribulation and hope.