Australians are currently deep in debate about the enormous cost involved in yet another celebration of Cook’s voyages to Australia. When I first arrived in Hampshire as a cub history adviser in 1988 one of my first jobs was to organise ways of commemorating the bicentenary of the ‘tall ships’. the issue of appropriate way . Now, just 30 years on, we are again discussing the best way of commemorating key moments in Australia’s past.
Even at KS1 Cook could be an interesting ‘significant person to study’. My title ‘Too many Cooks’ refers to the fact that people have come up with so many conflicting interpretations of his life story. Recently he has fallen out of favour- just too pale, stale and male? But he is well worth investigating as there are so many ingredients here that would make him a winner at KS1.
