A Visual Analysis of Meet … Captain Cook (2011) – a Modern Australian Picture Book

• Main Authors: Baguley, Margaret, Bedford, Alison, Ryan, Lisa, Kerby, Martin, Tualaulelei, Eseta
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: unknown
• Published: Australian Art Education 2023
• Subjects: Captain James Cook; children’s picture books; colonisation; First Nations peoples; ideational metafunction; Indigenous peoples; interpersonal metafunction; textual metafunction; visual analysis; voyages of discovery; First Nations
• Online Access: https://research.usq.edu.au/item/z33y4/a-visual-analysis-of-meet-captain-cook-2011-a-modern-australian-picture-book

This article analyses how images and text have been used in the children’s picture book Meet … Captain Cook (2011) by using the Ideational, Interpersonal and Textual metafunctions developed by Clare Painter et al. (2013). The metafunctions operate simultaneously and are about something (ideational), enable communicative interaction with others (interpersonal), and make sense in relation to previous understandings (textual). An examination of the images and texts using this framework will facilitate an insight into how the author and illustrator of Meet … Captain Cook explore Cook and his legacy, notably his first encounter with the First Nations peoples of Australia, and how it contrasts with the historical record. The metafunctions developed by Painter reveal an often-precarious balancing of a long-standing and often uninterrogated respect for Cook and the colonial legacy of white possession and Indigenous dispossession.