It’s like Captain Cook’s axe

Fri 28 Mar 2025

Zac Langdon-Pole is interested in re-contextualising how certain histories, materials, people and processes shape our understanding of the world. Another World Inside this One 2024 installed in the eleventh Asia Pacific Triennial, is loosely based on the antipodean (Australian and New Zealand) saying, 'it’s like Captain Cook’s axe' — a reference to an object that has been altered so extensively that little remains of its original self.

Though there is scant proof that Captain James Cook ever had, or wrote about, his own axe, this saying flows from a common belief that he did, and that the head of the tool was replaced twice and the handle six times, leaving nothing of the original object.

Langdon-Pole takes this concept a step further, in that he carves and paints the American hickory handle of a store-bought axe to resemble the tree sapling from which the wood would have been cut for its manufacture.

For many familiar with the saying, the importance of the tree — destroyed to craft the handle — is not even considered. The artist therefore points to the way in which deep connections to the natural world nurtured by the indigenous inhabitants of Oceania have been both overlooked and actively destroyed by European colonisers in their domination of these lands and their histories.

Edited extracts from the publication The 11th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, QAGOMA, 2024

Art that makes you think
Asia Pacific Triennial
30 November 2024 – 27 April 2025
Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA)
Brisbane, Australia
Free entry

Asia Pacific Triennial Extended
View this work at GOMA until 13 July