A 110-year-old statue of Captain Cook in Melbourne has been toppled by some legend the eve before so-called Australia Day, in what is fast becoming my favourite tradition. At the same time, another monument in Queen Victoria Gardens was also vandalised.
The bronze Cook statue in St Kilda was found sawn off at the ankles and toppled onto the grass, lifeless as the man it’s based on. Spray painted in red over the statue’s now very-sad looking plinth, a promise read: “the colony will fall”.
According to Victoria Police, the statue was vandalised around 3.30am and it is now investigating the “criminal damage”.
The statue has since been carted off to be assessed for the severity of damage and have the graffiti from the monument.
Closer to the CBD, a monument in Queen Victoria Gardens was also vandalised — a classic case of being splattered in red paint.
Port Phillip Mayor Heather Cunsolo said that the council had hired security to protect the Captain Cook statue, but the vigilantes got to it before the guard arrived.
Honestly, the fact that whoever did this actually managed to saw off the entire statue without being caught despite extra surveillance measures is a flex in itself.
However, Cunsolo was not impressed and issued a bit of a scolding to those who protest these outdated monuments.
“We understand and acknowledge the complex and diverse views surrounding Australia Day,” she said, per ABC News.
“We can’t condone, however, the vandalism of a public asset where costs will be ultimately borne by ratepayers.”
Here’s a thought: save us taxpayers some dollars and just… don’t replace or fix it? It’s clearly not *that* valued of a public asset in some communities if it keeps being vandalised — this is the third time since 2018, and the Captain Cook statue in Sydney’s Hyde Park has also been consistently defaced.
Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan slammed the vandalism and said it had “no place in our community”. Predictably, she has committed her party to reinstating the statue.
Opposition leader John Pesutto also hit out at the vandalism, and went so far as to call it “violent”.
“There’s no place for acts of vandalism or any other violent acts against people or property in our community,” he said.
“We support the right of people to protest and demonstrate but it must always be done in a peaceful and respectful way.”
See, the thing is, why must people be “respectful” to monuments — literal inanimate objects — that not only represent but uphold the actually violent ideals that allowed and justified the colonisation and genocide of Aboriginal people? These aren’t just random sculptures. They serve the specific purpose of sanitising history and glorifying figures that are responsible for atrocities we like to forget about.
In the more than 200 years since Captain Cook first landed in so-called Australia, the Aboriginal population has faced horrors that settlers can’t imagine, the local environment has been destroyed, and climate change has been accelerated at a devastating rate.
Calling for respectability politics towards a lump of metal amidst very real violence towards Aboriginal folk from the state is not just bizarre, it literally upholds colonialism. Like, why are our authorities more protective of statues than living, breathing people? Get outta here with that shit.
Anyway, here’s a list of Invasion Day rallies and events you can attend on January 26 that don’t involve licking the boots of a coloniser who died centuries ago.
Image: Nine.
