Hyde Park statue damage shows a reality that Australia must confront

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This was published 6 years ago

Hyde Park statue damage shows a reality that Australia must confront

By Paul Malone

I don't recall too many coalition members of parliament raising objections when the statue of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was torn down in Firdaus Square, Bagdad on 9 April 2003.

The shock jocks didn't rant and rave about the re-writing of history or the need to preserve monuments.

The statue of Captain James Cook in Sydney's Hyde Park was defaced last weekend.

The statue of Captain James Cook in Sydney's Hyde Park was defaced last weekend.Credit: Cole Bennetts

No. It was all glowing reviews and evidence of the success of the American led invasion.

But now it seems statues, or at least Australian statues, are sacrosanct.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull described the vandalism of statues of James Cook and Lachlan Macquarie as a cowardly criminal act and said this was what Stalin did.

"When he fell out with his henchmen he didn't just execute them, they were removed from all official photographs — they became non-persons, banished not just from life's mortal coil but from memory and history itself," he said.

"Tearing down or defacing statues of our colonial era explorers and governors is not much better than that."

But it's not just totalitarian leaders, the Taliban and the Islamic State who destroy statues.

A host of Eastern European former communist countries have taken down statues, not least those of Stalin.

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And before that the then communist countries ordered the destruction of Nazi statues.

Indigenous broadcaster Stan Grant's mild suggestion that we should question the inscription on James Cook's statue that says Cook "discovered" this territory in 1770 has unleashed a host of commentators who maintain such statues are inviolate.

Grant did not suggest that Cook's statue should be pulled down as is happening in the United States of America where statues of treasonous slave-owners are being toppled.

No Australian should be upset by the proposals to change the wording on Cook's statue to say that he explored and mapped the coast of this territory.

That's what he did and it was a major pioneering achievement worthy of note.

Much more controversial is his action in claiming the east coast of this continent for Britain.

But that action would have meant little had it not been for the British conquest that began in 1788.

There should be no evasion of the fact, invasion it was and military might imposed British authority.

Governor Lachlan Macquarie might be credited with improving the street layout of Sydney and Hobart but he also authorised the education of Aboriginal children, sometimes by forcible removal and he ordered punitive expeditions to clear the country of Aboriginal tribes he considered to be troublesome.

"In the event of the Natives making the smallest show of resistance – or refusing to surrender when called upon so to do – the officers Commanding the Military Parties have been authorized to fire on them to compel them to surrender; hanging up on Trees the Bodies of such Natives as may be killed on such occasions, in order to strike the greater terror into the survivors," he wrote in his diary.

Do we really need a stature honouring this man in central Sydney?

If we must, it should record this ruthless aspect of his role in winning the war.

Such invasions are not unique to Australia. They have been the way of the world.

In Great Britain over centuries waves of Jutes, Angles, Saxons and Frisians invaded, to be followed hundreds of years later by the Normans.

It might be possible to trace an individual modern-day Englishman's genetic lines but the people of England today are a mishmash of these tribes.

We don't know what battles were fought between the various clans in Australia in the tens of thousands of years before the British invasion but the evidence we have suggests that Aboriginal people were much like the rest of us.

People don't need shields to hunt kangaroo or goanna. They're made for a purpose.

Early Europeans noted inter-tribal wars, blood feuds, raiding and battles fought over territory, wells and women.

Anthropologist T.G.H. Strehlow described a black-on-black massacre in 1875 in the Finke River region of Central Australia and in the late 1880s in the Coffs Harbour region a local man Walter Harvie witnessed a tribal battle with 500 fighters where three were killed outright and many seriously wounded.

In Victoria, escaped convict William Buckley who lived with Aboriginal people in the early 1800s observed a number of fierce battles resulting in deaths.

And anthropologist Lloyd Warner concluded that about 200 men died from organised warfare in north-east Arnhem Land between 1909 and 1929.

Many observers recorded the violent abuse of Indigenous women by Indigenous men.

It's reasonable to conclude that Australia was not a peaceful paradise before the Europeans arrived.

But this does not justify the European invasion and massacres.

Historian Professor Lyndall Ryan has mapped more than 150 sites on the east coast where violent attacks on Aboriginal people took place.

At a number of these 60 or more people were killed and at Warrigal Creek in Gippsland in1843 over a period of about five days about 150 people lost their lives.

Dispossession was not a one off event.

Indigenous people who adopted European ways, established farms and grew crops, found their land confiscated yet again.

In 1937 John Moseley, who had served as a tracker with the police and went on to clear land and build a cottage in northern NSW, was confronted by police who tried to oust him and removed his water tank.

He wrote to The Macleay Chronicle, "I made a protest . . . and . . . was told that I own nothing . . . not even the land which I spent the best part of my life working and improving for the past forty-five years . . . I served my State with honesty. The very thing I took pride in, the Police Force, two days ago made me feel as small as a slug under an elephant foot."

In a rare concession the Aboriginal Protection Board ruled that the old man was not to be removed without authorisation but he died the following year, leaving his son to fight for their land.

He in turn was refused title and died in May 1942.

Every community and generation chooses which parts of its history to recall, which events are to be commemorated and which symbols should be used to remind us of our past.

Updating our history to more correctly reflect reality should not be a problem for a mature country.

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