Divided opinion about the Western Australian government’s swift, unilateral removal of a statue honouring the former AFL player Nicky Winmar’s stand against racism in light of his domestic violence conviction highlights the potentially fraught nature of memorialising the living.

What should happen to the statue or the plaque, the street name or building honouring a living person should they transgress after its dedication? Should the memorial, no matter what form it takes, be amended to document the transgression? Or simply removed, as was the case with the Perth Stadium statue depicting the former St Kilda player and Noongar man famously lifting his jersey and pointing at his skin in response to terrible racial abuse by Collingwood spectators in 1993?

These are at once highly vexed practical and moral questions to which the official answers – from governments and other institutions – seem largely arbitrary.

I’ve argued previously that public statues and monuments are not of themselves histories – although they can be portals into them, fostering constructive discussion about the past and present, about changing values, and social and political mores.

The removal of the Winmar statue effectively symbolises the state’s wilful cancellation of him due to his egregious crime.

This is not the first time a governing institution has de-memorialised a public figure. In 2014 WA’s Bassendean council, where convicted sex offender and paedophile Rolf Harris grew........

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