Australia and the British monarchy: Lingering on?

On 22 August 1770, Captain James Cook climbed the highest peak of Possession Island and ‘in the Name of His Majesty King George the Third took possession of the whole Eastern Coast’. This was the formal beginning of the relationship between Australia and the British monarchy. With Cook’s declaration and the celebratory firing of ‘three Volleys of small arms’ the ancestral home of some 500 Indigenous clans became Crown Land. With the arrival of the First Fleet on 26 January 1788, this theoretical dispossession became reality for the Eora people who lived in the Sydney basin.