Monumental errors: how Australia can fix its racist colonial statues
Australia is littered with monuments to old wars and colonial victors, but where are the monuments to the Frontier Wars and our Indigenous heroes?
30 Aug 2017
Bruce Charles Scates
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Visual Arts
Captain Cook statue, Hyde Park, Sydney. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.
War memorials are a feature of the Australian landscape. Obelisk and arch, broken pillar and stone statue remind us of the crippling loss a young nation faced in campaigns overseas. But where are the monuments to conflicts fought in our own country – a brutal war of dispossession that left deep and enduring scars on countless communities?
A prize winning historian, novelist and film producer, Professor Bruce Scates FASSA is the author/co author of 12 books and numerous articles. His main expertise is on Anzac and the contested memory of war but he also works in the fields of labour and environmental history, the contested politics of memorials and Indigenous histories. Committed to communicating history to the widest possible audience, he has featured in television documentaries and written numerous opinion pieces for the daily press. He is the writer and producer of 'Australian Journey', is the recipient/co recipient of university, state and national awards for teaching and works in the field of digital history. He is Professor of History at the Australian National University.
