The statue will be part of a $50m redevelopment of the Botany Bay site, says Scott Morrison

Sydney to get new $3m Captain Cook memorial in 'inclusive project'

The treasurer, Scott Morrison, has announced that a new $3m memorial to Captain Cook will be built at Sydney’s Botany Bay, as part of a “very inclusive project” to commemorate the site of European colonisers’ first arrival on Australian soil.

The statue will be part of a broader $50m redevelopment of the site – including a museum, cafe, ferry wharves and visitors centre – that will create a semi-aquatic memorial precinct.

Morrison told Sydney’s Daily Telegraph he expected the monument to be “quite lovely” and to include Indigenous elements.

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He also told the Weekend Australian the project would create “a place of commemoration and recognition and understanding of two cultures, and the incredible Captain Cook” on the site of the explorer’s April 1770 landing.



“It would be [implemented] in a sensitive way but one that in no way stepped back from acknowledging the national significance of that day ­almost 250 years ago,” he said.

Captain Cook statue vandalised in Melbourne before Australia Day Read more

In August last year, a statue of Cook in Sydney’s Hyde Park and one of former NSW governor Lachlan Macquarie were defaced with graffiti phrases such as “no pride in genocide”, in what the prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, likened to a Stalinist purge.

The Hyde Park statue’s inscription claimed Cook “discovered” Australia and was criticised for being factually incorrect.

Macquarie’s statue, created in 2013, had been criticised for memorialising genocide, because of the governor’s April 1816 order of the Appin massacre, a military raid where he told soldiers that Indigenous people should be “hanged up on trees in conspicuous situations, to strike the survivors with the greater terror”.

Scott Morrison (@ScottMorrisonMP) A national insult & disgrace. Does not keep one indigenous child safe, in school or end up in a job. Grow up idiots #auspol pic.twitter.com/DorQRPDmEc

In January, another statue of Cook was vandalised in Melbourne before Australia Day.

The New South Wales attorney general, Mark Speakman, told the Daily Telegraph the memorial, which would be funded by the Commonwealth and NSW governments, would be “a very inclusive project”.

'No pride in genocide': vandals deface Captain Cook statue in Sydney's Hyde park Read more

“This is a site of major national significance and I hope what we’re doing at Kurnell will be a chance for Australians to commemorate many layers of Australian history,” he said.

The current memorial to Cook at Botany Bay was built in the 19th century. The design of the new monument will be put to tender, and it is expected to be built before the 250th anniversary of Cook’s landing, in April 2020.



Morrison told the Daily Telegraph the site had “received scant attention from governments for decades”.

“I’ve been attracted to the idea of this aquatic monument for a decade,” he said.