On significant days and significant dates:

We all love anniversaries that end in zeros, and we attach special significance to any anniversary that's a multiple of 50, so it's interesting that April 29 2020 passed quietly without anyone paying attention to it. /1

While we were all in our national lockdown, April 29 marked the 250th anniversary of the first attempted murder of an Aboriginal person by a white English invader. /2

It's recorded in Cook's journal that Endeavour arrived in what's now known as Botany Bay on 29 April 1770. After selecting suitable beach, a longboat was dispatched towards shore with a landing party. /3

From that longboat, before the very first English person had set foot on Sydney soil, Cook's party grew bored with failed attempts to communicate with a group of Aboriginal people on the shore, and muskets were fired from the boat, injuring one. /4

This is 8 years before the arrival of the First Fleet, and the very first interaction with indigenous Australians in Sydney and the incoming settler-government ended in attempted murder. /5

Cook continued his campaign of lethal racist violence throughout the Pacific region for many years, until he was killed by indigenous Hawaiians in 1779, after kidnapping their king in an attempt to ransom them into providing materials and slave labour to repair his ship. /6

To this day, Hawaiians observe the anniversary of his death by stabbing in the Battle of Kaelakekua Bay on 14 February as a day of celebration. /7

We've commemorated the first gun battle in Australia with a plaque at the site in Botany Bay at Kurnell inscribed with a reproduction of Cook's journal entry describing the attack. https://goo.gl/maps/Y5kRcWjACGLuzqGL8 /8

Almost none of Australia's 25 million current inhabitants will ever read that plaque, preferring instead the resolutely whitewashed view of Cook's heroic achievements they learned in what's colloquially known as "Australian History" in primary school. /end