This is the tale of three cities and the same number of statues, two of them colonial era and one from early this century.

All were erected to celebrate the experiences of prominent white men who lived in colonial Australian times and who respectively treated the Indigenous people of their realms barbarously, murderously and contemptuously.

I’m talking about: the 1889 Hobart statue of former Tasmanian premier and thief/trader in Indigenous body parts William Crowther; the 2013 Sydney statue of the fifth governor of New South Wales, Lachlan Macquarie, a massacre commander who used “terror’’ tactics against Aboriginal people; and the statue dedicated in Melbourne in 1865 to the ill-fated explorers Burke and Wills and their expedition, who First Nations people might have been able to save had the explorers more readily accepted help instead of shooting at them.

The cities that respectively stage each of these problematic statues have responded with varying alacrity to the ethical, white-washing and historical dilemmas each has posed to modern Australia (there are many others besides that need dealing with).

In 2022 Hobart city council voted to remove the statue of Crowther, a surgeon who stole the skull of the deceased Tasmanian Aboriginal man William Lanne in pursuit of the racially charged Darwinian pseudoscience of phrenology. Across Australia, countless heads of Indigenous people – and other body parts – were stolen to meet the market of (mostly British) adherents of this voodoo pursuit, which adhered to the fallacious view that head shape determined human temperament and intelligence and different races’ rung on the ladder of civilisation.

Crowther was among them. Not surprisingly, his bronze statue in Franklin Square was frequently vandalised (red paint was a favourite), most notably in 2024 when it was cut down at the ankles and its plinth spray painted with the words WHAT GOES AROUND. Crowther was toppled just hours before the Tasmanian Civil and........

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