Indigenous Australians and their supporters have for more than a century been perplexed about some statues and place names that make false assertions about white European achievement, and celebrate the murderers and murder of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
Curiously, it was not until 2017, when a debate broke out over the removal of Confederate statues in the US that a broader cultural and media awareness gave rise to the so-called “statue wars” here.
And just as Australia’s shameful record on black deaths in custody and the accompanying Black Lives Matter protests have segued from the outrage in the US over the killing of George Floyd, the toppling of statues of slavers in the UK might give Australia pause to reconsider who we have come to celebrate in statuary, bricks and mortar, and nomenclature.
It is not a pretty history.
There is this for a starting point: There are more statues that celebrate animals in this country than there are dedicated to either women or indigenous people.
Consider Bungaree, whom I have written about previously. He was a remarkable man, a diplomat of sorts between the tribes of the Eora nation and the white invaders.
Like Woollarawarre Bennelong before him, much has been made in Australian history of Bungaree’s supposed slippage between two worlds and his descent into drunkenness (in a colony whose lifeblood was grog). However, other historians, such as Keith Vincent Smith, portray a man wise to the racial realpolitik of colonial advancement.
Bungaree packed it in. Among his many other achievements he was the first person born on this continent to circumnavigate the country, something he did with Matthew Flinders. Flinders got the credit, of course. Indeed he is eulogized in a statue on Sydney’s Macquarie Street.
Nearby is a statue of Trim, Flinders’ cat, which also went on the voyage.
However, there is no statue, no plaque — nothing — dedicated to Bungaree.
It is instructive that the statues or monuments that do memorialize indigenous people of this continent so often get it wrong.
For example, the plaque close to the grave of Bennelong in Sydney’s lower north shore suburbia reads: “Bennelong was an Aborigine who befriended the first colonists, lived for a while as Governor Phillip’s guest and visited England where he became the toast of society...”
Who was the guest? On whose land?
The Australian War Memorial (which does not tell the story of frontier war that killed, by some estimates, at least 60,000 indigenous people in Queensland alone) nonetheless has two stone gargoyles depicting the faces of an Aboriginal man and woman. Typifying the ethnographic approach to Indigeneity of the era when they were installed (the memorial opened in 1941) the stone faces are set amid others depicting Australian birds, mammals, reptiles and marsupials.
Indigenous people — and many others, including multiple former historians and curators at the memorial — find them profoundly offensive and have recommended their removal. The memorial had the opportunity to permanently remove them when the commemorative courtyard, upon which walls they are fixed, was renovated to remove asbestos in recent years. Instead the gargoyles remain in place, refurbished, the war memorial as intransigent on them as it remains on its refusal to depict frontier war.
The gargoyles are no less offensive than the names bequeathed across the continent to the places where mass murders of indigenous people happened. Murdering Island. Poison Waterhole Creek. Slaughterhouse Creek. Massacre Bay. Murdering Gully. There are eight Skeleton Creeks in Queensland alone.
Such names do not commemorate the massacred, but the very act of massacre.
In country towns and cities across Australia are the street signs and suburbs named after, the university buildings and statues dedicated to, killers of indigenous people, eugenicists, racists and establishment figures who profited from slavery, and who believed Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were lesser humans.
And so, there are many statues and plaques dedicated to syphilitic grifter John Batman, who hunted and killed the Tasmanians before striking a bogus “treaty” with the indigenous people of what became Melbourne. Streets in Darwin and Alice Springs are named after William Willshire and Paul Foelsche respectively, both murdering cops who saw indigenous people as akin to animals. Willshire wrote books about his killings and abuse of Indigenous women.
History, meanwhile, has bestowed upon Lachlan Macquarie a reputation as the great civilizer, despite ordering his troops to steal children from the site of massacres he likewise ordered his troops to conduct, and his use of “terror” tactics against the traditional owners his men massacred at Appin in 1816. There is no mention of this on the statue of this “perfect gentleman” dedicated in Sydney in 2013. It stands as a historically pointless monument. Nobody could excuse it as being a mere product of the views of its time. It ought to be removed by Sydney City Council.
Meanwhile, a longer overdue and bigger discussion is warranted on whether older statues and monuments should be removed — or amended to include the broader uglier, truths about their subjects.
The names of killers of indigenous people have been removed from Australian electorates and buildings. Just as statues can — as the City of London has proven in recent days — be removed.
No statue or monument must stand eternal.
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