Tony Ballantyne’s Captain Cook and the Unsettled Afterlives of Empire is one of those history books that feels less like a biography and more like a long, uneasy conversation New Zealand keeps having with itself. It’s literary, carefully argued, and quietly provocative—never shouting, but constantly nudging you to notice how Cook keeps reappearing whenever the country argues about who it is.
Ballantyne starts with cultural shock tactics. Sort of. One of the most striking threads in Ballantyne’s postcolonial section is the way he situates New Zealand’s debates within wider Pacific currents. Haunani‑Kay Trask’s late‑1980s visit to Aotearoa—where she challenged celebratory narratives of Cook and empire—becomes a kind of hinge moment.
On the prime show ‘Holmes’, Trask’s unapologetic framing of Cook as a coloniser and symbol of dispossession collided with a television culture that still treated him as a largely heroic figure. The outrage from many Pākehā viewers, and the show’s discomfort with her critique, exemplify what Ballantyne calls the “unsettled” nature of Cook’s memory: the sense that to name him as a coloniser is to attack the foundations of national identity rather than to describe historical reality.
Ballantyne uses episodes like this to show how Cook functions as a pressure point: when Pacific intellectuals insist on the violence of his voyages, the backlash reveals how tightly imperial and national myths are still held.
The book feels eerily prescient when read alongside Winston Peters’ recent decision to name the new Cook Strait ferries Kupe and Cook, and his pre‑emptive attack on “snivelling wokesters” who might object to Cook’s name.
Ballantyne has already written, outside the book, that debating Cook’s legacy is nothing new—that arguments over whether he is a hero, a harbinger of colonisation, or both have been running since the eighteenth century.
In the book, similar naming controversies—streets, schools, statues, commemorative events like Tuia 250—are treated as case studies in how memory orders work:
Placing Kupe beside Cook: The pairing echoes Beaglehole’s imagined conversation between the two navigators, but Ballantyne points out the tension: Kupe’s voyages belong to a world of ancestral routes and already‑inhabited islands; Cook’s belong to an imperial project that turns those islands into objects of European knowledge and control.
“A mature country does not run from its history”: Peters’ line could almost be a chapter epigraph, but Ballantyne would likely ask whose history, and whose maturity. The book insists that facing history means acknowledging both scientific achievement and colonial violence, not using one to cancel out the other.
The ferries become, in this wider frame, floating monuments—extensions of the same memory politics that play out in bronze and stone.
Across seven chapters Ballantyne organises Cook’s “afterlives” into three broad phases—imperial, national, and postcolonial memory—each with its own preferred version of Cook. He is, Ballantyne acknowledges in his introduction, forever burdened by the ‘weight of old ghosts’. That is the myths and mysteries of Cook’s influence, the impacts of the information he returned to the Empire and the new opportunities it afforded, much to the detriment of the Pacific. Cook, whether intentional or accidentally, was a prolific disseminator of resources used for future colonial plans by missionaries, colonial immigration companies, future industrialists, whalers, gold and mineral prospectors, farmers, and naval forces.
With botanist Joseph Banks on board, he not only brought back maps and observations but an extensive collection of exotic plants, which were planted, grafted and genetically manipulated, and often replanted in other islands, far from their origins and widely across the empire. Stealing, in a sense, the taonga of one island or place and transplanting it in another - Sometimes these new plants – or animals (in the case of possums) became evasive weeds or pests, All done without ‘permission’ or understanding of consequence. Colonizers not only inhabited new lands but they infected them, brought liquor and medicines, education and religion, war and crime, guns, clothes, rules, laws, punishments.
Regarding the Imperial memory, Cook is the benevolent agent of empire: the scientific navigator, the man of Enlightenment reason, the figure whose voyages extend Britain’s moral and commercial reach. Ballantyne shows how early biographies, paintings of his death, and commemorative medals and statues fold Cook into a visual and textual culture that celebrates imperial expansion and treats violence as regrettable but necessary scenery.
Then, there’s the National Memory (Cook the founder, the persistence of Cook, the valiant explorer, but was he?). By the mid‑twentieth century, especially with J. C. Beaglehole’s scholarship, Cook becomes a cornerstone of a distinct New Zealand story—less about Britain, more about “our” discovery and “our” place in the world. Ballantyne traces how Beaglehole’s imagined conversation between Kupe and Cook, “as men converse between their peers”, smooths over the difference between discovering empty islands and rediscovering already-inhabited lands in the service of empire.
Finally, we have the Postcolonial memory. This is where the ghosts haunt and are the loudest. The most charged section of the book follows the rise of Māori and Pasifika perspectives, activist art, and public contestation. Cook becomes a deeply unstable symbol—simultaneously a man of science, a harbinger of colonization, and a figure whose name evokes death, dispossession, and the ongoing legacies of empire. Ballantyne’s chapters here are dense with artworks, protests, and political speeches, showing how Cook is conscripted into contemporary “culture wars”.
Ballantyne doesn’t abandon the “life” in favour of pure memory studies; instead, he threads a concise, lucid Cook narrative through the book.
Cook’s commission to observe the transit of Venus at Tahiti in 1769 anchors the familiar story: the Royal Society’s scientific ambitions, the Royal Navy’s cartographic hunger, and the secret instructions to search for the Great Southern Continent.
Ballantyne revisits the Endeavour’s track around the east coast of Australia and through Aotearoa, emphasising how charts, place‑names, and journals are not neutral records but instruments of possession. Tōtaranui becomes Queen Charlotte Sound; Meretoto becomes Ship Cove; Te Moana-o-Raukawa or Cook Strait, itself is folded into an English naming regime that still structures everyday geography.
The book is unsparing about the violence of first encounters—shootings in Aotearoa, deaths in Pacific communities, and the escalating tensions of the third voyage. Cook’s killing at Kealakekua Bay, Hawai‘i, in 1779 is treated not as a tragic interruption of heroic exploration but as the culmination of frayed relationships, misread rituals, and a commander whose Enlightenment self-image had been worn down by years of conflict.
In a dedicated chapter, Ballantyne’s narrative sits in conversation with Anne Salmond’s book, ‘The Trial of the Cannibal Dog’ (Allen Lane/Yale University Press, 2003), which reimagines the voyages from Polynesian perspectives. It emphasizes Cook as “our ancestor Kuki” in some Pacific traditions, even as his expeditions brought profound disruption. The chapter dives deep into cross‑cultural encounters and Polynesian perspectives. Ballantyne steps back to look at the long arc of reception: how those encounters are later narrated, illustrated, commemorated, and fought over. Reconstructing the voyages as collisions of worlds, foregrounding Māori and Polynesian understandings of mana, reciprocity, and ritual, and showing how Cook himself becomes entangled in those logics.
Ballantyne’s chapters on visual culture are some of the most vivid. He traces how Cook’s image has been reproduced, vandalised, removed, and reimagined across Aotearoa. The Kaiti Hill statue—an Italian Admiral’s uniform misread as Cook, nicknamed “crook Cook”—is almost too perfect an emblem of imperial misrecognition. Its vandalism, damage, and eventual removal to storage in 2019 mark a shift from unquestioned commemoration to active contestation.
Ballantyne shows how statues in Gisborne, Christchurch, and elsewhere become sites of protest, re‑inscription, and artistic intervention. Plaques are rewritten; paint is thrown; counter‑monuments and performances reframe the figure from below.
Into this landscape he folds contemporary music and art. Protest art shows its face in many forms – from paintings and sculpture to music such as Shihad’s 2021 album ‘Old Gods’—with tracks like “Tear Down Those Names” and “Empire Falling”— all read as part of a broader cultural movement that questions colonial iconography and the persistence of imperial “gods” in public space.
The album cover, with its apocalyptic, de‑sacralising aesthetic, sits comfortably alongside activist art that targets statues and memorials. Shihad aren’t specifically writing specifically about Cook. But they are an example of how rock music, like visual art, participates in dismantling the old memory order and imagining new ones.
Ultimately this book tracks how all those collisions echo through centuries of text, art, politics, and protest, revealing that Cook’s meaning is never settled—that every generation rewrites him according to its anxieties and hopes. In a recent RNZ interview Ballantyne reinforces this: he describes Cook as “always a contested figure”, and the book as an attempt to unweave the tangled web of his legacy rather than to deliver a final verdict.
By the end of this book I’d like to say I have a nice clear, polarised, black and white verdict. But that’s not the case. Our relationship with Cook remains complicated. And will remain such. As a literary work, ‘Captain Cook and the Unsettled Afterlives of Empire’ is measured, elegant, and quietly insistent. Ballantyne writes with a historian’s care but also with a novelist’s sense of motif—names, statues, artworks, TV interviews, ferry christenings all recur like refrains, each time slightly altered. The book doesn’t ask you to love or hate Cook; it asks you to notice how much emotional labour New Zealand invests in deciding which Cook to put on the pedestal, which Cook to tear down, and which Cook to sail across the Strait. In doing so, it becomes less a “Cook book” than a mirror held up to a country still working out how to live with the afterlives of empire.
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