Featuring a colourful ship skippered by two white men in ornate, military headwear, Kiapten Kuk Ship (Captain Cook’s ship) presents Elisabet Kauage’s take on the story of the British naval officer Captain James Cook and his journeys of ‘exploration’ and ‘discovery’ throughout the Pacific. In Kauage’s imagining of this history, Cook’s two white officers enjoy the upper decks while the crowded space below is occupied by a dozen men and women wearing Melanesian ceremonial bilas (ornamentation). While Cook’s crew where primarily European, Kauage’s painting may gesture towards either the later transportation of British convicts in ships’ holds to Australian penal colonies or the ‘blackbirding’ of Melanesian peoples (from 1847 to 1904) onto slave ships destined for sugar plantations in Queensland and northern New South Wales.