Statues can teach about past wrongs

Keeping controversial monuments can do good, James Parker says

I FEEL very conflicted with the debate about statues of historical people – let’s face it, white, male colonists – and whether they should be taken down.

On the one hand, the feelings of Indigenous people about having monuments preserved which commemorate men involved in their dispossession – and worse – are absolutely to be respected.

On the other, as someone involved in historical research and writing, I feel taking the statues down would be a denial of history.

I have a couple of alternative strategies but, first, I want to tell a story.

When I was in St Petersburg in 1981 – when it was called Leningrad and was part of the Soviet Union – I was perplexed to see an equestrian statue of Peter the Great standing proudly in a public square. I naively thought such tsarist monuments would have been all torn down after the revolution of 1917.

Even more surprising to me, I was informed that during the dreadful 900-day siege of Leningrad in World War II, the statue had been heavily protected with sandbags and other defences, and that the Leningraders were proud that it had survived when over a million of them had died.

I went to the Siege of Leningrad memorial and saw the vast burial field. The people of the city saw the statue of the tsar as part of their history and their heritage even though Peter had been no friend of the common people. His building of the city – almost floating it on a malarial swamp in the delta of the River Neva – had cost thousands of labourers’ lives.

So that is one response to historical monuments and we are, here, obviously in a different place and time. Also no Australian colonial statue that I can think of comes close to the equestrian Peter in Petersburg, which is quite magnificent.

But I do think we have to accept that the statues we are agonising about were put up to commemorate people who were prominent in their time, and we need to know why they were so honoured and we need to tell why we might not so honour them today.

Rather than tearing down the monuments, let us interpret them.

We could do this, in situ, in two ways. Put interpretation boards next to the historical statues explaining who these men were and why their record is, now, not so shining and bright.

That would be one step but what if we put up parallel statues of Aboriginal people alongside them, with the interpretation boards?

In Hobart, we could have a statue of Truganini alongside the despicable William Crowther (pictured).

The point is to understand the past and to learn from it – not to hide it.

I fear that just taking down the statues would be an aid to historical amnesia.

We don’t want to slip back into what anthropologist Bill Stanner called the “the great Australian silence” – about the treatment of Indigenous people – especially not now, when Aboriginal issues seem to have at last gained some traction with the general public.

Premaydena’s James Parker was educated the University of Tasmania and Australian National University. He had a career in theatre and films in the 1970s-80s before returning to Tasmania and working in history and heritage-related tourism, hospitality, education and publishing.