Botany Bay Remembered: Mary Gilmore, Captain Cook, and the Knotted Hands of History

April 29, 1770

On this day, Captain James Cook sailed his sturdy vessel, the Endeavour, into the uncharted embrace of a great southern harbor—later christened Botany Bay.

It was not merely a matter of mapping coastlines, but a christening of place through curiosity: a landing that would sprout a new chapter in both geography and botany.

Cook’s naturalists, Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander, wasted no time collecting treasures for science’s garden—seeds, fronds, and petals unknown to European eyes.

Their enthusiasm for these living jewels earned the site its verdant name: Botany Bay.

A fitting tribute, for what is discovery, if not the planting of wonder?

Nearly 160 years later, Australian poet Mary Gilmore would lend her voice to the soil itself in her poignant poem, Old Botany Bay.

She reminds us that the land remembers—every step, every hand, every seed sown, whether from devotion or despair.

I’m old
Botany Bay;
stiff in the joints,
little to say.
I am he
who paved the way,
that you might walk
at your ease to-day;
I was the conscript
sent to hell
to make in the desert
the living well;
I bore the heat,
I blazed the track-
furrowed and bloody
upon my back.
I split the rock;
I felled the tree:
The nation was-
Because of me!
Old Botany Bay
Taking the sun
from day to day…
shame on the mouth
that would deny
the knotted hands
that set us high!

Those “knotted hands,” as Gilmore wrote, belong to the convicts who toiled to carve civilization from wilderness—hands both punished and purposeful.

And as any gardener will tell you, hands—though worn and weathered—are instruments of rebirth. Soil knows no shame in honest labor.

Gilmore captured that truth again when she wrote:

Even the old, long roads will remember and say,
‘Hither came they!’
And the rain shall run in the ruts like tears;
And the sun shine on them all the years,
Saying, ‘These are the roads they trod’ —
They who are away with God.

Is this not the gardener’s creed, too?

To toil, to bend beneath sun and storm, and yet leave behind beauty that remembers us?

Each flowerbed, like those Australian roads, whispers of the hands that planted it.

Even in decay, remembrance blooms.

In recent years, the Australian government allocated $50 million to redevelop Cook’s 1770 landing place—a modern act of commemoration, “a place of recognition and understanding of two cultures,” according to Treasurer Scott Morrison.

As debates flourish around statues and memory, perhaps the greater monument is the living landscape itself—uncharted still, except by wind and root and seed.

So today, dear reader, when you step into your garden, think of old Botany Bay—not as a relic of empire, but as a reminder that every cultivated space once began as wilderness.

In our own patch of ground, may we find a gentler way to honor both the explorers and the earth they touched.

For even the smallest garden is a quiet act of discovery.