New eBook Release: Beyond Cook: Explorers of Australia and the Pacific

When Europeans entered the Pacific they entered a place they thought they knew, and a place that was already peopled.  European explorer accounts of Australia and the Pacific are fascinating in what they reveal about the people and places explorers encountered and about European expectations of what they would find.  

JCU academic, Dr Claire Brennan has written an ebook as a guide to European exploration of Australia and the Pacific, with accounts of those contacts and how to interpret them in the light of European preconceptions and misunderstanding, and the actions taken by the people descended from the regions' original explorers.

Beyond Cook: Explorers of Australia and the Pacific, by Dr Claire Brennan is freely available as an ebook and is available now via the JCU Open eBooks platform. 

This Open Education Resource (OER) ebook seeks to place the experiences of James Cook in their proper context. In Australian society, Cook is disproportionately famous. While his Endeavour voyage made a significant contribution to European knowledge of the Pacific region and mapped a portion of the coast of the Australian continent, he was neither the first nor the last European explorer to travel through the region and record his observations. Putting Cook in his place allows his experiences to come into focus and raises questions about his prominence in popular histories of Australia.

This ebook is divided into five parts. The first part examines who the Europeans who reached the Pacific were, and how they came to be there. The second part engages with the ways in which the Pacific has infiltrated European thought. Australia lurks at the edge of the Pacific, and the third part of the ebook turns to this continent exploring familiar themes: what were the experiences of contact between explorers and the people who already knew the regions being explored, what opportunities did the explorers represent for Indigenous people who wished to travel, how did the preconceptions held by European explorers influence their behaviour, and how were European rivalries played out on the far side of the world? 

The fourth part raises questions about the structure of exploration by looking at the groups who were excluded: Pacific Islander voyagers, women travellers, animal companions, and the influence of the ships themselves can be detected within official records, despite their systemic marginalisation. The fifth part of the ebook examines stories of the original human exploration of the Pacific and Australia. 

Throughout the ebook, the concepts of exploration and discovery are looked at from multiple viewpoints, and we see how the Pacific region was explored by many groups of people over the centuries.

The JCU Open Education Initiative

The JCU Open Education Initiative is a project by the Division of Student Life, spearheaded by JCU Library. The aim of the project is two-fold: 

• We hope to support lecturers in adopting, adapting and creating Open Educational Resources including textbooks and workbooks in order to better support the learning of our students at JCU 
• We hope to make information about the people and places of the Tropics more widely accessible and understood. More than 40% of the world's population live in the Tropics and 40% of the world's surface is within the Tropics, but the area is often under represented in teaching materials.