POPULAR images of Oceania in the 1770s and early 1780s had been dominated by Otaheite, later supplemented with Owhyhee and Pitcairn. European navigators, of course, had visited many other places, but where these were represented back in the metropolis, it was most often as minor elements in groups demonstrating the variety and scale of Oceanic voyaging. In the finale of Omai, for example, at least a dozen ‘Otaheitean’ figures, including all the named Oceanic characters and a retinue of six warriors, took centre stage. They were flanked by sixteen ‘Owhyhee’ warriors in distinctive costumes, and groups of three, four, or five, each representing a stop on Cook's itinerary: Aotearoa, Tonga, Vanuatu, the Marquesas, Easter Island, and several regions of the far north Pacific. Among this spectacle of Oceanic cultures, there were no actors at all to represent Australia (or ‘New Holland’, or ‘New South Wales’).

Yet Cook had spent months mapping the coast of what would later be called Australia, following European predecessors such as William Dampier and Abel Tasman in the search for a Great Southern Continent or Terra australis incognita. Although the largest landmass that Cook and Banks found in the South Seas did not meet the overblown expectations of European geographers, the glimpses of coasts and mountains afforded by this voyage did prove the existence of an unfamiliar land in the south. The Endeavour team diligently collected sketches and specimens, and recorded what information they could. A handful of Australian plants and animals, especially the kangaroo they described, and the cuttings they gathered from the astonishing site they named ‘Botany Bay’, attracted metropolitan curiosity. Their interactions with Eora and Guugu Yimidhirr people, though, were limited and violent, prompting little of the self-reflection found in metropolitan texts on Otaheite. In August 1770, Cook pronounced himself ‘confident no European had ever seen’ the east coast of the landmass before, and ‘hoisted English colours’, staking England's formal claim to ‘the whole eastern coast, from latitude 38˚ to this place, latitude 10 ½˚ in right of his Majesty King George the Third, by the name of NEW SOUTH WALES’.