This Full Agency, This Decolonised Spirit: Talking Blak to Cooks’ Cottage

This chapter discusses a project to counter the colonial fantasy presented by Cooks’ Cottage, a large monument to white colonial nation-building located in a central Melbourne park. In 2018, Paola Balla, Clare Land, and Kate Golding came together to respond collaboratively to an approach from the City of Melbourne to assist the City in ‘incorporating Indigenous perspectives’ into the historical displays at Cooks’ Cottage. They renegotiated the brief from the City of Melbourne and produced an image-rich monograph, Blak Cook Book (2021), a set of provocations that platforms sharp critique of Cook and his memorialisation by First Nations and other artists, activists and scholars. Balla, Land and Golding worked from the starting point that the Cottage itself is irredeemably colonial; they also came up with several propositions that could counter the Cottage more substantively than any gestures towards incorporating Indigenous perspectives into its existing displays.