Opinion: Statues with limitations: The bronzed figures who stand still while time marches on | Malcolm Knox
Few Australians would have heard of William Crowther until, on Tuesday, he was posthumously cancelled. Crowther died in 1885, but his bronze likeness met its maker in the form of Hobart City Council, which voted to send him from Franklin Square to its “valuables collection”. Hobart became the first Australian council to go further than talk about removing an offensive statue.The case against Crowther was indisputable.
Historian Cassandra Pybus said other statues commemorated even more barbaric Tasmanians, including William Franklin, who gave the orders to desecrate the bodies of Indigenous men, and whose name adorns the square in which Crowther will no longer stand. Pybus said that as long as Crowther is singled out as the only colonist mutilator, “you’re not going to have the truth-telling about what a shocking and complete process was going on”.
On the other hand, as Liberal alderman Simon Behrakis put it when opposing the Hobart council vote, “we need to preserve our history … warts and all. [Crowther’s] appalling acts should not be minimised, should not be sanitised away, but I think removing the statue does just that. I think it does sanitise history to an effect.”
What is the point of a statue? The website Monument Australia catalogues 38,389 monuments and memorials to individuals. Recent ones seem exclusively devoted to sportspeople. Australia has always loved putting up a statue to a hero, even though history reveals that heroes have feet of clay, and it’s only a matter of time and discovery of misdeeds, or wholesale revision of standards, before such statues will be questioned, vandalised, or ultimately pulled down.
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