James Cook's Endeavour reached the eastern coast of Australia in 1770 after observing the transit of Venus from Tahiti. The expedition charted the coastline and landed at Botany Bay before claiming the region for Britain. These actions preceded dispossession, violence and extensive colonisation of Aboriginal lands.

Kenneth Slessor's Five Visions of Captain Cook helped make Cook's shipboard experience a major subject of Australian modernist poetry. Aboriginal poets later answered the exploration narrative by foregrounding prior sovereignty, invasion and the radically different meanings of sea and country.