In their sudden, unoriginal and disturbingly opportunistic crusade to see statues of the men who founded Australia reconsidered, if not banished entirely from public view, Stan Grant & Co trample fact and history for no better reason than the promotion of rancour, spite and division.
On Monday, September 21, Andrew Taylor of the Sydney Morning Herald approached the University of Sydney’s public relations department on an information-fishing expedition. He said he’d been thinking about the removal of Confederate monuments in the US and wondered if there were any Australian targets that might deserve the same treatment. He asked the PR people to pass on to the university’s experts in Australian history the following questions:
Who are the most egregious historical figures in Sydney who have been celebrated with statues, monuments, place names in your opinion?
There are statues, streets, a university and place names dedicated to Governor Macquarie who ordered massacres of indigenous people. Should he be commemorated in this way?
Are there monuments to historical figures elsewhere in Australia who have had a similar role in historical injustices?
The inscription on Governor Macquarie’s statue in Hyde Park reads: “He was a perfect gentleman, a Christian and supreme legislator of the human heart.” What do you think of this?
Plaques of Rolf Harris have been removed in WA. Should monuments to Macquarie, Captain Cook etc be removed or explanatory notes added?
Why isn’t there the same acknowledgement of figures in Australian history who played a role in slavery, killings and land removal as there is in the US?
Taylor’s leading questions were clearly more those of an agent provocateur than that of the “Independent, Always” reporter the Herald proclaims on its masthead. He was obviously hoping to provide fodder for the emergence of a local activist campaign to emulate that in Charlottesville, Virginia, where, amidst scenes of street violence that left one woman dead, officials removed the statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, and in Baltimore, Maryland, where, in one night earlier this month, city authorities removed four Confederate statues commemorating the American Civil War.
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Andrew Taylor promotes his own article detailing “concerns” about the “affront” of statues in Hyde Park.
The Australian campaign for the eradication of politically incorrect statues and similar historic symbolism began on the ABC last Friday with a column from Stan Grant, these days the ABC’s indigenous affairs editor.
Grant compared the local acceptance of statues of Captain James Cook with what was going on in the United States. “Statues are coming down, old flags of division are being put away and the country is tearing itself apart. Fascists, neo-Nazis and klansmen who wrap themselves in the flag of the Confederacy are reigniting the old grievances of the civil war.” Grant criticised Donald Trump’s attempt to blame both sides and quoted a New York Times editorial saying, “There’s a moral awakening taking place across America, but President Trump is still hiding under his blanket.”
But, Grant says, while America cannot avoid the legacy of racism, we in Australia find it all too easy to avoid. “We vanish into the Great Australian Silence.” Anthropologist Bill Stanner coined that phrase in the 1960s to describe what he said was “a cult of forgetting practiced on a national scale” but Grant says: “We have chosen to ignore our heritage. So much history here remains untold.”