A quarter of a millennia ago this week, the son of a Scottish farm labourer turned navy commander sailed the coastline on a mission his backers claimed would help accurately measure how far our planet is from the sun.
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After witnessing the transit of Venus across the sun, the ship's crew, along with a Tahitian navigator named Tupia, were handed a second task by the ever expanding British Empire - to search for a long spoken about, yet unmapped land, thought to be somewhere in the southern seas.
Rumours labeled it simply Terra Australis. Southern land.
Two hundred and fifty years after Lieutenant James Cook sailed the HMB Endeavour along the Far South Coast, events marking and discussing the modern meaning of the anniversary have been cancelled, and museum exhibitions forced to move online due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
On board Cook's ship was Britain's richest man and botanist Sir Joseph Banks, who while near Merimbula on April 20, 1770, described seeing "gentle sloping hills which had the appearance of the highest fertility, every hill seemed to be cloth'd with trees of no mean size; at noon a smoke was seen a little way inland and in the evening several more".
Around the smoke and lawns were the Djiringanj people, stretching from the Pambula River to the Wagonga River, across a landscape peppered with sacred mountains.
Djiringanj and Ngarigo Elder Aunty Ellen Mundy said many people from different parts of the world had already sailed the Australian coastline, and said Cook would likely not have located the continent without the help of indigenous people and their knowledge of the stars.
She said Chinese sailors had been visiting Australia for 500 years before Cook's arrival.
"There's no way Cook could've found Australia by himself, without help. Polynesians used the stars," Ms Mundy said.
"The old people would've got messages from the sky and the stars, and the animals and their dreams. They would have what you would call premonitions," she said.
Cook described seeing "hills, ridges, planes and valleys with some few small lawns", and said the smoke across the landscape was a "certain sign that the country is inhabited".
It was April 21, the same day he named sacred Gulaga mountain after the one humped dromedary camel, writing in his journal that he was unable to find a safe place to anchor the ship anywhere in the Bega Valley.
Word had spread along the coast of the ship's arrival at Point Hicks on April 19, even before the lieutenant's violent landing at Kamay, now known as Botany Bay, on April 29 with fires lit along the coastline helping spread the news.
Bermagui man Rodney "Murrum" Kelly, a decedent of Gweagal warrior Cooman, shot at by Cook's men that day in Kamay, has been lobbying for the return of stolen artefacts from overseas museums, some of which were due to be on exhibition in Canberra this month.
He said he has heard stories of Cook's men using explosives against people, and even Cook himself admitted to injuring a man on the beach with his second of three musket shots during his first contact with Australians.
"Why I feel so strongly about getting the Gweagal shield repatriated is that it tells the story of that first day in 1770. It shows that we were fired upon, while [Lieutenant James] Cook was in his boats," he said.
In 2016, a descendant of Banks' servant James Roberts, who was just 16 years old at the time, backed Mr Kelly's battle to repatriate artefacts taken back to Britain after the voyage.
Cook had first spotted people off the coast at Bawley Point near Batemans Bay, which were most likely members of the Dhurga speaking Walbanga.
Djiringanj man Warren Foster said stories say Cook's guide and translator Tupia had been kidnapped by the crew before helping them navigate to New Zealand.
He said the crews behaviour "wasn't all good", and Pacific Islanders tell a different story of Cook's time in the Pacific, which would eventually lead to his death while trying to kidnap and ransom the King of Hawaii, Kalanipuu while on his third voyage.
Mr Foster said locals tell stories of Cook's crew kidnapping and abusing young children across the Pacific, and shared a story told to him by one of his uncles about the arrival of the Endeavour, which looked like a giant bird floating in the water.
He said the renaming of Gulaga, the mother mountain, to Mount Dromedary in 1770 was an insult, but he said after 250 years people are "willing to learn and listen" to Djiringanj people about the need to look after the land.
"When I was younger there was lots of racism, but now it's a lot better," he said.
Cook's legacy continues, with a new multi-million dollar memorial being constructed at Botany Bay, which was planned to be opened to coincide with the 250th anniversary of his landing.
Artefacts from his journeys on exhibition in museums including the British Museum, and a global society based in the United Kingdom in his name was created in the 1990s.
The prime minister's electorate carries his name, as does a university in Townsville, a string of Pacific Islands, mountains in Alaska and New Zealand, and even a crater on the Moon.
Even his ships have been immortalised, with the Apollo 15 Endeavour and the space shuttle Endeavour named after Cook's ship, and the space shuttle Discovery was named after a ship from his third voyage.
Eighteen years after Cook's voyage along the Far South Coast, King George III claimed the land under the British crown with the arrival of Captain Arthur Phillip, following a plan devised by Endeavour crew member James Mario Matra to colonise the land.
His plan for the colony would include American loyalists, Chinese people and South Sea Islanders. However, by the 1780s Matra's plan was changed to include convicted felons as the majority of settlers of the new colony.