Statue wars

— Susan Marsden,  PHA South Australia 

In late 1994, on a visit to Fremantle, I was impressed to read a plaque added to the ‘Explorers Monument’ that commemorated the deaths of white men in conflict on Western Australia’s colonial frontier. The plaque was erected ‘by people who found the monument before you offensive’, and gave  an essential corrective to the story, stating ‘the ‘right of the Aboriginal people to defend their land … [and] the history of provocation which led to the explorers’ deaths’. The new plaque commemorated those killed at La Grange and ‘all other Aboriginal people who died during the invasion of their country’. 

Bruce Scates describes this plaque as ‘one of the first public recognitions of prior sovereignty in Australia. An instance of dialogical memorialisation, it critiques the lies of white history’, and was one of the first expressions in this country of the ‘statue wars’ (Scates, ‘Set in stone? Dialogical memorialisation and the beginnings of Australia’s statue wars’, Public History Review 28, 2021, p 5). 

As professional historians we find and share multiple histories, and re-interpret the acts of heroic men. Australia’s historical monuments provide prominent places to do so, as Kiera Lindsey aims to do with children for a History Trust project in Adelaide.  

So, when planning a journey this September to Bristol in the UK, I was keen to see the historical exhibition about a world-famous event in the statue wars. In 2020 the statue of Edward Colston (1636-1721), erected in 1895, was toppled in a Black Lives Matter mass protest. This followed years of contention about the prominence given to a man whose acts of philanthropy drew on riches gained in Bristol’s Atlantic slave trade from Africa to the Americas. Protestors threw the bronze statue into Bristol Harbour with a mighty and much-photographed splash.  

Then what happened? Climbing the stairs in Bristol’s lively museum, M Shed, as I wrote later in my diary, I found that ‘in an exemplary illustration of dialogical memorialisation [the paint-splashed statue] now lies in a protective glass case surrounded by film of the protest, placards carried, and responses (including a thoughtful piece by Bristol’s Jamaican Mayor, Marvin Rees’. I concluded that ‘this is the right thing to do, to layer and present conflicting histories rather than obliterate them’. In a digital world tangible heritage takes on a new significance. Monuments are the most prominent presentations of history to the public. They offer opportunities for reappraisal in both physical (plaques, exhibitions), and digital form. The other important element in this display, first a temporary exhibit inviting people’s suggestions about what to do, is how the curators invite such responses, also to their own questions, and display these as well. 

The attention given to that act of protest in 2020, to the far more notorious slave trade, and to black lives from then to now in one of the most mixed cultural communities in the UK is a great animating feature of this free museum, and on a Saturday drew crowds of Bristol people of all ages. We can learn from this, for how we might remake our public memorials and in our Australian museums, including the planned new Adelaide Museum of South Australian History.