Kiapten Kuk Ship (Captain Cook’s ship) presents Elisabet Kauage’s take on the story of British explorer Captain James Cook (1728–79) and his voyages throughout the Pacific region. In Kauage’s reimagining, 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 were primarily European, Kauage’s painting may gesture towards either the later transportation of British convicts in ships’ holds to Australian penal colonies, from 1787 to 1868, or to ‘blackbirding’, the enslavement of South Pacific Islanders to work on sugar plantations in Queensland and northern New South Wales, from 1847 to 1904.