[Captain Cook's statue and the Australian Museum, Sydney]undated [ca. 1880s]

The statue of Captain James Cook, erected in Hyde Park opposite the Australian Museum, was unveiled on 25 February 1879. It commemorated Cook's death in Hawaii in 1779. Although Hyde Park's greenery may look old, most of its vegetation and 600 trees were planted after construction of the city's underground railway in the 1920s. In 1844 it was described as 'merely a large piece of brown ground fenced in'.