The British government has issued an oh-so-carefully worded expression of “regret” for the killing of Māori in Aotearoa, today’s New Zealand, at the point of first contact during Lieutenant James Cook’s “voyage of discovery” 250 years ago.

Regrets! The old empire certainly has had cause for a few when it comes to the violence it has meted out to the indigenes of the places it took during Britain’s colonial expansion.

For the deaths of a million Irish in the potato famine. For the Kenyans tortured and imprisoned during the Mau Mau insurgency. For the Indians killed in the Amritsar massacre. And, now, for the Māori, whose first contact with Cook’s HMS Bark Endeavour in 1769 was characterised by disastrous violence for the first Aotearoans.

UK expresses 'regret' over Māori killings after Cook's arrival in New Zealand Read more

After Endeavour anchored near the eastern bank of the Tūranganui River close to New Zealand’s present-day Gisborne, Te Maro, a senior man of the Ngāti Oneone group, was promptly shot and killed while leading a ceremonial challenge to the British sailors. At least eight more Māori were killed over the next few days in what British history has largely cast, based on the diaries of Cook and others on the Endeavour, as a misunderstanding.

As New Zealand counts down to next week’s 250th anniversary of Cook’s arrival there, Britain’s high commissioner in the country, Laura Clarke, made a “statement of regret” about the violent first contact.

“Here on behalf of the four countries of the United Kingdom, on behalf of the people of those four countries … I acknowledge the pain of those first encounters,” she said.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest British high commissioner Laura Clarke hugs a Māori elder as she visits Gisborne on Wednesday to express ‘regret’ for the killing of Māori in Aotearoa. Photograph: AP

The violence Clarke referred to was stemmed by Tupaia, a Tahitian priest and experienced seaman who joined the Endeavour in the Society Islands and helped Cook and his crew navigate to New Zealand and onwards to the east coast of Australia.

The remarkable story of Tupaia, his skills as a navigator and his fractious relationship with Cook and his crew, has been lost in the non-Indigenous commemorative frenzy, in Australia at least, about Endeavour’s arrival and its supposed critical role in national birth at a time when this continent was already replete with hundreds of nations reaching back tens of thousands of years.

He is celebrated in Tahiti and New Zealand. But here in Australia Tupaia has largely fallen through the cracks of a national non-Indigenous narrative that places Cook’s arrival at the centre of modern Australian birth that ignores the sensibilities of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. It’s a trope that has long trivialised the violence that unfolded after Endeavour’s arrival at Kamay (Botany Bay) on 29 April 1770 – conflict that was, unfortunately, prescient for all that would eventually follow Cook’s colonial claim.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A 1886 picture depicting Captain Cook’s 1770 claiming of Botany Bay. Photograph: Print Collector/Getty Images

New Zealand has been far more engaged with Māori sentiment towards Cook and how his anniversary might be marked than Australia is with Indigenous views about how to commemorate the great pathfinder and cartographer’s arrival here. This shouldn’t surprise. For Māori culture has long been central to New Zealand’s mainstream identity and politics, especially compared with Australia where for generations governments and cultural institutions have largely relegated 60,000-plus years of continuous Aboriginal civilisation to the margins of history – to something unconnected “over there” that happened before “settlement” and the oppressive white Australian federation.

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New Zealand’s ministry for culture and heritage, which is organising a replica Endeavour circumnavigation of the country, has, for example, instructed the ship only to stop at ports “where a welcome is clear” from Māori communities.

Will we ever see a day in Australia where the government is similarly alive to Indigenous sentiment and sensibility about the way history and national foundation is celebrated? While we close our eyes and think of Australia Day, we will see soon enough. For just as Aboriginal groups protested en masse against the 200th Cook celebrations in 1970, and the 1988 bicentenary of invasion, Indigenous people will hit the streets and ports again on the lieutenant’s 250th.

There will be calls for the replica Endeavour which will circumnavigate Australia (Cook never did this in his own bark) as part of the commemorations here, to be banned from some ports. The response of a government led by Scott Morrison – the member for Cook and a great booster of the lieutenant who will spend $50m in his honour, stripped from the ABC budget, next year – will be instructive.

Until very recently commemorations at present-day Kurnell in southern Sydney, where Cook first set foot on the east coast, involved a recreation of the landing – replete with the moment his crew shot two Gweagal men. The spears and shield of those men remain in the British Museum, with the continued requests of their Gweagal family for their return treated with cold English condescension, even, the descendants would say, contempt.

There were more violent encounters as Cook sailed up the east coast – including at Endeavour River (Wabalumbaal) – renaming, in the Queen’s English, Indigenous places as he progressed.

Cook’s legacy, like the man, is complex. But whether white Australia likes it or not, in this country’s Indigenous consciousness he remains largely emblematic of the colonial and postcolonial violence and oppression that came after Arthur Phillip’s invasion 18 years later. The doorman to invasion.

Which is why a little British and Australian regret over Cook’s treatment of the Aboriginal people would go a long way to enhancing understanding of the continent’s more recent shared history, as difficult and freighted with injustice and oppression as it is. Not least, that would be a small step on the road to the full-scale apology and reparations, well overdue, that both countries owe Indigenous Australians for all that British colonialism dealt them.