Just as centenary commemorations for the national foundation story that is Anzac end later this year, the government is gearing up to celebrate another yarn that often seems interchangeable – the imminent 250th anniversary of the arrival of Captain James Cook and HM Bark Endeavour.

If you were concerned about an insufficiency of monuments to Cook’s “discovery” of Australia, relax, please. The federal government has already trolled progressive Australians who’d challenge the Endeavour’s continental “discovery” and national foundation myth, with a plan to strip $48m from the ABC for Cook commemorations including something akin to a statuary theme park at Botany Bay where the good captain anchored.

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Anzac commemorations have cost commonwealth taxpayers about $600m. Let’s see how much they can dedicate to Cook as the big day approaches.

But first a little rain on the parade. The HMS Endeavour arrived on 29 April 1770. But the secret instructions from the British Admiralty ahead of the voyage were issued on 30 July, 1768 – 250 years ago later this month.

It’s worth reconsidering those secret instructions (well known to Indigenous Australians but not so much to others). Perhaps even more enlightening is a set of “hints” to Cook, his botanist Joseph Banks and the accompanying Swedish-born naturalist, Daniel Solander, before they sailed to the Pacific to observe the transit of Venus across the sun.

Cook received two sets of instructions from the admiralty – the first relating to observing Venus, the second “secret” set ordering him to go and “make discovery of” the great southern continent. So insightful are they to the manner in which Britain claimed and seized the continent, they have been deemed manuscripts number 1 and 2 respectively at the National Library of Australia, the institution that serves, in many ways, as Australia’s national memory and conscience.

The secret instructions read:

You are ... to observe the Genius, Temper, Disposition and Number of the Natives, if there be any and endeavour by all proper means to cultivate a Friendship and Alliance with them, making them presents of such Trifles as they may Value inviting them to Traffick, and Shewing them every kind of Civility and Regard; taking Care however not to suffer yourself to be surprised by them, but to be always upon your guard against any Accidents. You are also with the Consent of the Natives to take Possession of Convenient Situations in the Country in the Name of the King of Great Britain: Or: if you find the Country uninhabited take Possession for his Majesty by setting up Proper Marks and Inscriptions, as first discoverers and possessors.

Two things spring to mind here. The first is that the order – “Shewing them every kind of Civility and Regard” – didn’t go so well; Cook’s men fired on the Gweagal tribesmen on the beach, wounding one. A shield bearing a hole from a musket round (Banks insisted in his diary it came from a lance) remains in the British Museum.

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The second is this – “ ... with the Consent of the Natives to take Possession of Convenient Situations ...”

Which blackfella ever said, “Sure Captain, take the lot”?

Which brings us to a letter of “hints” to “Captain Cooke, Mr Bankes,” and Solander from James Douglas, the 14th Earl of Morton and president of the Royal Society in London which in February 1768 petitioned King George III to support the passing of Venus and “discovery” expedition. Douglas, a Scot, was something of a man ahead of his times, a natural philosopher, humanitarian and political iconoclast – a genuinely enlightened product of the Enlightenment.

Douglas’s hints advised the expedition to treat with kindness and understanding any Indigenous people encountered. He urged Cook and his scientists to show “the utmost patience and forbearance with respect to the Natives of the several Lands where the Ship may touch” and proceed with an understanding that asserted, unambiguously, the Indigenous ownership of the land.

Douglas urged them:

To check the petulance of the Sailors and restrain the wanton use of Fire Arms.

To have it still in view that sheding the blood of these people is a crime of the highest nature – They are human creatures, the work of the same omnipotent Author, equally under his care with the most polished European, perhaps being less offensive, more entitled to his favour.

They are the natural, and in the strictest sense of the word, the legal possessors of the several Regions they inhabit.

No European nation has a right to occupy any part of their country or settle among them without their voluntary consent.

Conquest over such people can give no just title; because they could never be the Aggressors.

After landing at Botany Bay Cook sailed north to what is now the tip of Queensland where, on Possession Island, at sunset on Wednesday 22 August 1770, he declared the place a British possession.

Cook named both Moreton Bay and Cape Moreton after Douglas; the translator of Cook’s diaries misspelt his title. But despite that acknowledgment, it seems the earl was ignored.

So, amid the unnecessary new Cook monuments and the inevitable frenzy of commemoration of his “discovery”, bear in mind the prescience of James Douglas, 14th Earl of Morton, in those hints. For he was 224 years ahead of the high court in Mabo and others v Queensland when it came to understanding the fiction of terra nullius on the Great Southern Land.