They're local monuments, but should colonial statues still be on a pedestal?

Australia has more than 200 statues dedicated to political and business leaders during the colonial period (1788 - 1901). In recent years there have been calls from many Indigenous groups for truth-telling on their monuments, to reflect some of their complex legacies.

The City of Sydney Council is reviewing the plaques of 25 statues dedicated to colonial leaders, as they look to provide more context on their legacies.

WARNING: Distressing content.

Lachlan Macquarie is largely remembered as the governor who transitioned NSW from a convict colony into a prosperous society. But he's also a highly controversial figure.

During his 12 years as governor from January 1810 to December 1821, he played a key role in developing the NSW economy by establishing its first currency and bank.

There is a statue of him in Sydney's Hyde Park, looking down Macquarie Street, home to the NSW Parliament.

That's not all that’s named after him. There are at least 20 places and institutions named for Macquarie, including a university, the city of Port Macquarie, a lake, a lighthouse, a bank and a wall at Sydney's Royal Botanic Garden.

The plaque beneath the statue reads: "He was a perfect gentleman. A Christian and supreme legislator of the human heart … The chisel of gratitude shall portray the beloved and majestic features of General Macquarie."

Lachlan Macquarie's links to the Appin Massacre

But there's a darker side to his legacy, according to Tess Allas, a Wiradjuri woman and researcher.

"I think he was a terrorist, a government-sanctioned terrorist, a crown-sanctioned terrorist," she told The Feed.

Allas is referring to Macquarie's role in the Appin Massacre, in which at least 14 Aboriginal people were killed in an area just south of Sydney.

"Macquarie wanted to clear the area for farming and settlements but there was resistance from certain Aboriginal communities," Allas said.

Major-General Lachlan Macquarie was originally from Scotland. Credit: Rights Managed/Mary Evans

"And in the wee hours of the morning of April 17 1816, some of Macquarie's troops went out to Appin and started massacring people."

"Some of the mothers woke up with their children and instead of being faced with bullets, they, with their children, jumped over the cliff into the river below and met their deaths that way."

Passages from Macquarie's diary at the time show that he had instructed his troops to hang the Indigenous bodies from trees "in order to strike the greater terror into the survivors".

Macquarie's Hyde Park statue was unveiled in 2013. Its plaque will now be reviewed by Sydney City Council.

The review, sparked by Yvonne Weldon, a Wiradjuri woman and the city's first Indigenous councillor, will look at the plaques and inscriptions of 24 other monuments of colonial leaders in the city's CBD.

Tess Allas believes Macquarie was a terrorist.

A council spokesperson said the review will look at how to recontextualise these colonial figures to better reflect their true history and the times they represent.

The City of Sydney Council review is part of a push for truth-telling following the Indigenous Voice to Parliament defeat in October. The referendum came out of the Uluru Statment from the Heart, which called for three key actions - Voice, Truth, Treaty.

The council said the referendum Yes vote in the City of Sydney area was at 70 per cent.

Allas, who works on Macquarie Street and passes the Macquarie statue every day, said seeing it makes her feel ill and she'd like to see it removed entirely.

However, this is not something the council is looking at doing.

"We laud him as if he did no wrong. We have to expose and tell the truth about all the other things," Allas said.

"And if we don't do that, we are denying ourselves our truth and the truth of our own history and the truth of who we are as a nation."

James Franklin is a historian and the editor of the Journal of the Australian Catholic Historical Society. He told The Feed the Appin Massacre was a blot on Macquarie's legacy.

"Macquarie did build up the colony and managed its transition from a convict jail to a proper settlement that is a functioning democracy and we should be grateful for that."

"Underneath there should be another small plaque saying that Macquarie is also remembered for ordering the killings of Indigenous men of the Cumberland area, such as the Appin massacre of 1816."

What's happened to other colonial statues?

In August 2023, Hobart City Council became the first council in Australia to vote to remove a statue of a colonial leader.

It voted to remove a statue of William Crowther, Tasmanian premier between December 1878 and October 1879, from Hobart's Franklin Square.

Before becoming premier, Crowther was a surgeon, and in 1869 he was suspended from practising after he removed the head of a local Indigenous man, William Lanne, and sent it to the Royal College of Surgeons in London.

He was also one of several colonial figures who were involved in the field of phrenology.

A Hobart City Council committee voted to remove the statue of former Tasmanian premier William Crowther in August 2023. Source: AAP / Anthony Corke

Phrenology is a now discredited field of science that claims to be able to determine a person's character and intellect by the size and shape of their skull.

It was often used to reinforce white supremacy.

The council cited these two factors in its decision to remove the statue.

Indigenous groups have been campaigning for years to have the statue removed and the consultation process with the council started in 2018.

But the council's decision has been appealed by former Hobart City alderman Jeff Briscoe, who argues the statue should remain on heritage grounds.

Jeff Briscoe believes the statue of William Crowther belongs to the people of Hobart and not the council as it was paid for in small donations from the community Source: Supplied

"It's got heritage because it's a significant statute paid for by the public, not paid for by the government,” he told The Feed.

Briscoe also questions the allegation that Crowther removed the head of William Lanne.

"He always denied mutilating William Lanne's body. And the two inquiries at the time could not determine one way or the other."

Briscoe said removing the statue would set a precedent for the removal of other monuments, buildings, and street names.

The statue will remain standing until after the findings of a Tasmanian Civil and Administrative Tribunal (TASCAT) hearing, due to start in February, are delivered.

Felicity Edwards, who is Hobart's acting Connected City director, said if the appeal is unsuccessful, the council intends to remove the statue and store it.

The stone plinth will remain, with context on Crowther's legacy and why the statue was removed.

What are some other controversial Australian statues?

Colonial-era businessman and entrepreneur Robert Towns has a statue in Townsville, the city he helped establish.

Towns was linked to the slave trade and shipped in labourers from the Pacific Islands to work on his plantations. The labourers were paid low, and sometimes no, wages.

During the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement his statue was vandalised - its hands were painted red.

Robert Towns owned a cotton plantation in Queensland

John Batman has a statue in Melbourne; he was an explorer and entrepreneur, and is considered to be the founder of the city.

But he was also a bounty hunter who killed Indigenous people in Tasmania during the Black War of the 1820s and 1830s.

The Black War was a frontier war against the Indigenous Palawa people of Tasmania.

An estimated 1,000 Indigenous people and 200 British people died.

Melbourne University politics professor Sarah Maddison told The Feed that Captain James Cook is another figure with a complex past.

His statues in Sydney's Hyde Park and Melbourne's St Kilda have been vandalised on multiple occasions.

Maddison attributes this to the idea that Captain Cook discovered Australia, something that is inscribed on the back of his statue in Hyde Park.

"[It] is just [a] gross mistelling of history. But to tell the other story complicates Australian history profoundly," she said

Have any actually been removed?

Maddison argues that colonial statues shouldn’t be destroyed if they're pulled down as they are still a part of Australia's "post-invasion history".

Professor Sarah Maddison believes colonial statues should be removed and placed in a museum with all the context on their good and bad contributions to Australia.

"Captain Cook [statues] should be in a museum with all of the context around what he did and didn't do.

"He didn't discover Australia, he did lead to the colonisation of this continent.

"Having a statue up in a public space implies quite directly that this is someone whose memory we should cherish, whose life work we should admire someone to whom we hold some sort of historic debt."

There is both a statue and monument dedicated to John Batman in Melbourne.

Monuments have been amended before in Australia. The City of Melbourne council changed one dedicated to John Batman on two occasions.

The original monument, erected in 1881, on the corner of the Queen Victoria Market site where Batman was buried, described him as the founder of Melbourne, which was then "unoccupied" land.

This was amended in 1992 with a small, bronze plaque underneath that acknowledged the land was "inhabited and used by Aboriginal people" before Batman arrived.

But in 2004 this plaque was removed after Indigenous groups said its wording was too weak.

The second plaque reads: "The City of Melbourne acknowledges that the historical events and perceptions referred to by this memorial are inaccurate.

"An apology is made to Indigenous people and to the traditional owners of this land for the wrong beliefs of the past and the personal upset caused."