Warra Warra Wai

How Indigenous Australians discovered Captain Cook, and what they tell about the coming of the Ghost People

By: Darren Rix, Craig Cormick

Narrated by: Wayne Blair, Lewis Fitz-Gerald

For the first time, the First Nations story of Cook’s arrival, and what blackfellas want everyone to know about the coming of Europeans

Both 250 years late and extremely timely, this is an account of what First Nations people saw and felt when James Cook navigated their shores in 1770.

We know the European story from diaries, journals and letters. For the first time, this is the other side. Who were the people watching the Endeavour sail by? How did they understand their world and what sense did they make of this strange vision? And what was the impact of these first encounters with Europeans? The answers lie in tales passed down from 1770 and in truth-telling of the often more brutal engagements that followed.

Darren Rix (a Gunditjmara-GunaiKurnai man, radio reporter and Archie Roach’s nephew) and his co-author Craig Cormick travelled to all the places on the east coast that were renamed by Cook, and listened to people’s stories. With their permission, these stories have been woven together with the European accounts and placed in their deeper context: the places Cook named already had names; the places he ‘discovered’ already had peoples and stories stretching back before time; and although Cook sailed on, the empire he represented impacted the people’s lives and lands immeasurably in the years after.

‘Warra Warra Wai’ was the expression called to Cook and his crew when they tried to make landfall in Botany Bay. It has long been interpreted as ‘Go away’, but is perhaps more accurately translated as ‘You are all dead spirits’. In adding the First Nations version of these first encounters to the story of Australian history, this is a book that will sit on Australian shelves alongside Cook’s Journals, Dark Emu and The Fatal Shore as one of our foundational texts.

©2024 Darren Rix (P)2024 Simon & Schuster Audio

Critic reviews

'You will close this book feeling closer to your country.' (Bruce Pascoe, author of Dark Emu)

'Rix and Cormick started with a supposedly "simple idea" but the result is complex, subtle, surprising and poignant … Warra Warra Wai is a triumph of collaborative truth-telling.' (Kate Fullagar, author of Bennelong and Phillip)

'A fascinating exploration of the view from both the ship and the shore … Warra Warra Wai is told with freshness, gentle humour and empathy … The land itself begins to sing to us all.' (Jeff McMullen, journalist, author, filmmaker)