© The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com ‘Of Rabbits and Pirates: After-Images of E. Philips Fox’s ‘Landing of Captain Cook at Botany Bay, 1770’ GOLNAR NABIZADEH* Abstract This paper explores the role of fantasy in E. Phillips Fox’s historical painting, ‘Landing of Captain Cook at Botany Bay 1770’ (1902) through two contemporary adaptations of the work in The Rabbits (1998) by John Marsden and Shaun Tan, and Daniel Boyd’s painting, ‘We Call Them Pirates Out Here’ (2006). Although markedly different in terms of their material production and aesthetic approach, the adaptations of ‘Landing of Captain Cook’ recapitulate its colonial fantasy by displacing the hyper-real contents of the original with surrealistic and pop elements, respectively. I suggest that as ‘after-images’, these adaptations usefully complicate the signiication of ‘Cook’ and in so doing, engage with dialogues about how ‘Australia’ is constituted, and how it might be imagined. In this sense, the adaptations consciously draw out the fantasy of ‘Australia’ in the original through their later aesthetic permutations. Keywords Phillips Fox, Captain Cook, fantasy, Australia, adaptation, Daniel Boyd, Shaun Tan. INTRODUCTION 1 The Rabbits (1998) by John Marsden and Shaun Tan, and Daniel Boyd’s painting, ‘We Call Them Pirates Out Here’ (2006) ofer playful and creative adaptations of the historical paint- ing, ‘Landing of Captain Cook at Botany Bay 1770’ (1902) by E. Phillips Fox (Figure 1). ‘Landing of Captain Cook’ depicts a colonial fantasy about a ‘foundational moment’ in modern Australian history. Although markedly diferent in terms of their material produc- tion and aesthetic approach, the adaptations of ‘Landing of Captain Cook’ recapitulate its colonial fantasy by displacing the hyper-real contents of the original with surrealistic and pop elements, respectively. In this way, the adaptations consciously draw out the fantasy of the original through their later aesthetic permutations, and in doing so, reshape its contours. I use the term ‘fantasy’ as Freud does, where a conscious or unconscious fantasy reveals not only a desire for a person or object, but also a yearning to be recognised as desirable in response. 2 I suggest that through this double relation, the colonial fantasy in ‘Landing of Captain Cook’ is not only located in the constructed vision of Cook’s landing as a kind of screen memory against a more vexed history, but is also located in the way it draws the viewer into the scene. Cook looks ‘out’ of the painting rather than meeting the gaze of the viewer (Figure 1). *English and Cultural Studies, The University of Western Australia. E-mail: golnar.nabizadeh@ uwa.edu.au. Adaptation Vol. 9, No. 1, pp. 35–45 doi:10.1093/adaptation/apu049 Advance Access publication 4 March 2015 35 at University of Dundee on October 1, 2016 http://adaptation.oxfordjournals.org/ Downloaded from