The arrival of Endeavour has been marked at 50-year intervals since 1820, and no doubt will be marked again in 50 years’ time. If the obelisk at Kurnell was a piece of private enterprise, erected to mark the centenary in 1870 at his own expense by the Hon. Thomas Holt of The Warren, which estate then took in the landing site at Kurnell, the far more ambitious proposal to erect a colossal bronze statue in honour of Captain Cook assumed the character of a project of proto-national significance.

Initiated by the harbour master at Sydney in anticipation of the centenary of Cook’s arrival, the Australian Patriotic Association took up the challenge of raising enough money to lay the foundation stone of the pedestal in time for the Queen’s second son and fourth child – Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh – to perform this task in Sydney on 27 March 1869. In his speech, the Duke lauded the fact that ‘the man whose fame we desire to commemorate has by a life of great discoveries and of scientific researches, increased so materially the territorial extent of the Empire’.

The commission went to Thomas Woolner, an original member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the only one who ever visited Australia. Woolner spent two years here in 1852–54, at first on the goldfields of Victoria, and subsequently creating bas relief portraits, approximately 30 all told, of the great and the good in Melbourne and then in Sydney. There, he got to know Henry Parkes and subsequently, upon Woolner’s return to England, kept in touch with him. Parkes, not yet premier of New South Wales, was almost certainly instrumental in securing Woolner’s services.

The site of the statue was directly opposite the Australian Museum in Hyde Park, than which you could hardly select a more prominent position. The unveiling took place on the 25 February 1879, and contemporary photographs demonstrate the degree to which that event was also conceived as a festival of patriotic fervour. Large stands were built to the east and west of the statue and accommodated more than 2,000 ticketholders. The bold inscription on the back of the plinth is the one that arouses most controversy today: ‘Discovered This Territory / 1770.’