Umm cook was an explorer and cartographer, just like Abel Tasman. Yet no one is carrying pitchforks to his memorial.

The hate against Cook is just people looking for a person to blame even without reason. He mapped Australia for the british he didn't colonise it. There was no way he could've 'colonised' with is crew of less than a hundred on the Endevour.

If you want to blame someone blame George the third, or Townshend who made the decision to colonise. Without them Australia would have been left behind (/colonised by someone else).

You can blame Gov. Phillip who lead the colonisation and was responsible for many of the decisions made.

But no, that would require people to Wikipedia for 3 minutes before founding an opinion. So we'll just jump on the uninformed bandwagon and scream "blame Cook!"

And to be clear, my opinion is that a lot that was done at the time was atrocious, and carried on far to long into far, far, far too recent history.

Just Cook wasn't the one that colonised Australia, he just drew it on paper and told the king. If you want to blame the colonisation, blame Townshend who made the decision yet many don't know him. If you want to blame the decisions when they got here, Phillip was in charge.

Blame the people who made the decisions not whomever is easiest/closest.