Warra Warra Wai

Shortlisted for the Queensland Literary Awards, Work of State Significance and The University of Queensland Non-Fiction Book Award
Shortlisted for the 2025 Prime Ministerâs Literary Awards, Australian History
Winner of the 2025 NSW History Award, Australian History Prize
Winner of the 2025 Marion ACT Literary Award, Non-Fiction
Winner of the First Nations History Award, Canberra Criticsâ Circle Awards 2024
Winner of the 2025 ACT Book of the Year Award

For the first time, the First Nations story of Cookâs arrival, and what blackfellas want everyone to know about the coming of Europeans.

Both 250 years late and extremely timely, this is an account of what First Nations people saw and felt when James Cook navigated their shores in 1770. 

We know the European story from diaries, journals and letters. For the first time, this is the other side. Who were the people watching the Endeavour sail by? How did they understand their world and what sense did they make of this strange vision? And what was the impact of these first encounters with Europeans? The answers lie in tales passed down from 1770 and in truth-telling of the often more brutal engagements that followed.

Darren Rix (a Gunditjmara-GunaiKurnai man, radio reporter and Archie Roachâs nephew) and his co-author Craig Cormick travelled to all the places on the east coast that were renamed by Cook, and listened to peopleâs stories. With their permission, these stories have been woven together with the European accounts and placed in their deeper context: the places Cook named already had names; the places he âdiscoveredâ already had peoples and stories stretching back before time; and although Cook sailed on, the empire he represented impacted the peopleâs lives and lands immeasurably in the years after.

âWarra Warra Waiâ was the expression called to Cook and his crew when they tried to make landfall in Botany Bay. It has long been interpreted as âGo awayâ, but is perhaps more accurately translated as âYou are all dead spiritsâ. In adding the First Nations version of these first encounters to the story of Australian history, this is a book that will sit on Australian shelves alongside Cookâs Journals, Dark Emu and The Fatal Shore as one of our foundational texts.