Simon Longstaff’s reading ‘The Ethics of Tearing Down Monuments’ describes the relationship between society and monuments such as statues, buildings and signs as “always changing”(Longstaff, 2020). This reading depicts the slow increase of public debate in regard to political monuments that has been apparent since the turn of the century, and whether they should be torn down, modified or left alone.
Discussions about historical monuments and statues have been grounds for political protests, challenging the past’s racist and violent social standpoint. But since the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, there has been increasingly more demands from society, recalling politically incorrect statues from around the world such as Robert E. Lee, Cecil Rhodes, Captain James Cook and other historically significant figures which represent, for some, the degradation of humans, the imprisonment of slaves and the incorrect nature of our history.
Despite the obvious political standpoint in regard to these monuments, there has been wide discussion over the state of these statues- whether they should be removed, left alone or altered. For example, the statue of James Cook in Sydney’s Hyde Park has had calls to be taken down. Positioned in a god-like manner, making the audience look UP in awe at the statue, this monument forces the public to see him as a ‘hero’, inducing a power disparity in the current day society. The inscription of the statue, stating “Discovered Territory 1770”, has also created an outcry from the public as it still speaks to the notion of Terra Nullius and disregards the original Indigenous occupation of the land, dating back 65 000 years. Stan Grant dubbed this inscription as a “damaging myth”(Grant, 2017), thus contributing to the public outrage.
As a result of the heinous history, 12 000 Australians protested for Cook's statue to be taken down over its “links to colonialism and genocide”. (Rouse, 2020) This petition challenged the monument stating that rather than displaying Australia’s foundation and history, it acted as a symbol of the “forced removal, slavery, genocide and stolen land”(Barron, 2020). Simon Longstaff defends this standpoint by stating that monuments “normalise the past… (making) injustices easier to defend and more insidiously harder to see”(2020). Despite this argument though, politicians often defend these monuments for their “educational value” claiming that they’re a “part of our history” (Maddison, 2020) with Malcom Turnbull stating that “trying to edit our history is wrong”(Murphy, 2017). These political statements offer a large part about the discussion, talking about how, although these monuments represent a time of social and political misdemeanour, they also offer valuable insight into our history as a nation and how we as a society have progressed from those ways.
In contrast to the ideas of tearing down or keeping up monuments, others have suggested adding onto the historic statues in order to show the progress of humanity over the horrific past. As Morgan Mcphee stated in his blog post 'Celebrate Growth or Forget Pain', "the best way to do this is to erect more-worthy monuments around those which do not represent us now."(Mcphee, 2021) Stemming from this idea, I believe that rather than destroying historical monuments, or continuing their sensitive preservation, we should add onto statues around the world in order to display the progression of our society- communicating where we have come from and how we have evolved.
