Thank you for downloading this episode of a history of the world in a hundred objects from BBC Radio 4.

Today's object is one of the most potent in the whole of this series.

It has become symbolically charged, freighted with layers of history, legend, global politics and race relations. It's an Aboriginal shield,

one of the very first objects brought to England from Australia, and it was brought here by the explorer

Captain Cook.

We know the precise date that it came into Cook's hands,

the 29th of April, 1770.

We have written accounts of the day from Cook himself.

But the indigenous Australian who owned the shield did not write.

And this is why a history told from objects can be so important,

for the unnamed man confronting his first European on the shore at Botany Bay nearly 250 years ago,

this shield is his lasting statement. It's a bit of a cliche that they came from another planet. Of course they did.

And these gentlemen hopping out of the boats with these clothes on which looked very, very different,

and muskets of course. So the effect that it must have had upon a community

must have been very traumatizing.

In its absence really of adornment it's very raw and it seems to me incredibly

honest and useful and I think once we start to look at the other cultural

heritage and material objects of those people we find a great deal that Cook was not able to see.

A history of the world in a hundred objects. Australian Bark Shield

from Botany Bay,

made in 1770.

Captain Cook himself told us what he did see when he first arrived on the east coast of Australia. He wrote in his captain's log. Sunday the 29th in the afternoon, winds southerly and clear

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