The past is another country – they thought things differently there; and if the past shapes the present, the present also shapes the past. Arguments of Monumental Proportions – Fallen Idols
The defacing and destruction of monuments to dead and dubious white men is back in vogue – not that the practice has ever actually gone out of style. As The Australian’s Art columnist Christopher Allen writes in an article republished below, statues have been set up as monuments to great and not so great men and removed by their enemies for a very long time. Even without considering the many precedents in antiquity, countless statues were destroyed during the French Revolution, others during the mob violence of the short-lived “Commune” government in Paris in early 1871 – including the figure of Napoleon on the Colonne Vendôme – and many more under the Nazi occupation of Paris.
Then there is the tearing down the statues of tyrants in the fall of dictatorships, from the former Soviet empire to Iraq. In those instances, the state or a despot had set up multiple effigies all over the country as symbols of power and instruments of oppression, and they were overthrown in the collective movement of popular revolution.
To paraphrase Allen, portrait monuments proliferated in more recent times, particularly in the 19th century, as a consequence of increasing prosperity, patriotism or nationalism and local municipal pride. Monarchs, politicians, leaders of national unification or liberation movements, explorers and founders of new colonies, notable scientists and writers, philanthropists and other prominent citizens were commemorated in public statuary. Arguably, too many were raised; sometimes their subjects have lost the prominence they once had; or some of their deeds may now today be considered reprehensible. An argument could be made to relocate a statue to a museum instead, but such decisions ought not be taken lightly, especially if the justification for removal and relocation are ideological or made in response to online protests and vandalism.
in Arguments of Monumental Proportions – Fallen Idols, I wrote a while back:
“As an Aussie and a Brit of Irish parents, and as a history tragic, I find the long running monuments furore engrossing. Statues of famous and infamous generals, politicians and paragons of this and that grace plazas, esplanades and boulevards the world over, and their names are often given to such thoroughfares. They represent in visual and tangible form the historical memory of a nation, and as such, can generate mixed emotions reflecting the potentially conflicted legacies and loyalties of the citizenry”.
“It is”, I wrote, “about the control of history – and who controls it. We all use history, incorporating perceptions of our national story into lessons that guide or confirm our present actions and outlooks. Our history is written not only in scholarly narratives, but also, in commemorations, in statues, flags and symbols, in the stories that children are taught about their country and their community from their earliest school years, and in the historical figure skating they are taught to remember and honour. History, it is said, is written mostly by the victors – but not always. So, the inevitable tensions between different versions of the past fosters tension and conflict, and grievance and offense in the present. Particularly in onetime colonialist and settler countries, and the lands these once ruled and exploited … All sorts of emotions, hopes and fears lie behind our various creation myths. No matter the source of our different “dream-times” we are all correct in one way or another. People wheel out the wise old “blind men and the elephant” story to illustrate how blinkered we are; but in reality, if those blind men were given more time, they would have expanded their explorations and discovered a bigger picture”.
Which brings to recent events in Hobart, in our most southern state and one of Australia’s earliest colonies and the location of many of many bloody atrocities in Australia’s Frontier Wars, and to Allen’s article which tells the tale of a nineteenth century public figure whom very few Australians have heard of and of his illicit trafficking in the remains of a decease indigenous man.
Read also In That Howling Infinite another story of the British Empire’s sticky fingers: Bringing it all back home – the missing mosaic and other ‘stolen’ stuff
Felling Crowther’s statue is not the way to right a historical wrong
William Crowther’s statue, Franklin Square Hobart, May 2024. Nikki Davis-Jones.
No doubt many people, regardless of their political orientation, were disturbed by the recent news that a civic statue had been vandalized and destroyed under the cover of night by an anonymous gang of attackers in Hobart. The event was all the more shocking because the city council had already determined to remove the statue from its public location following controversy about the actions of the individual it celebrated.
This kind of attack, to be quite clear, has nothing in common with tearing down the statues of tyrants in the fall of dictatorships, from the former Soviet empire to Iraq. In those instances, the state or a despot had set up multiple effigies all over the country as symbols of power and instruments of oppression, and they were overthrown in the collective movement of popular revolution. In this case an individual monument to a respected citizen, erected by the community, was destroyed by a small group of zealots.
Statues have been set up as monuments to great men and removed by their enemies for a long time. Even without considering the many precedents in antiquity, countless statues were destroyed during the French Revolution, others during the mob violence of the short-lived “Commune” government in Paris in early 1871 – including the figure of Napoleon on the Colonne Vendôme – and many more under the Nazi occupation of Paris.
Statues have not always been effigies of individuals; some of the most beautiful Greek sculptures were simply of the ideal body; others represented divinities, as also in Christian, Buddhist or Hindu traditions. Portrait sculpture began in the Hellenistic kingdoms and flourished in the Roman period. After the fall of the Empire, and with the decline of all the arts, no sculptural likeness was made for a thousand years. The Renaissance rediscovered portraiture with enthusiasm, both in painting and sculpture, and over the next few centuries portraits of monarchs and other leaders became common in big cities.
Portrait monuments proliferated in more recent times, particularly in the 19th century, as a consequence of increasing prosperity, patriotism or nationalism and local municipal pride. Not only monarchs but prominent politicians, leaders of national unification or liberation movements, explorers and founders of new colonies, notable scientists and writers, philanthropists and other prominent citizens were commemorated in public statuary. Often these adorned and helped to shape the new public parks laid out for the enjoyment of populations in great modern cities.
Arguably too many of these monuments were put up, and sometimes the individuals in question have lost the prominence they once had; or some of their deeds may now be considered reprehensible. In certain cases an argument could be made to relocate a statue to a museum instead, but such decisions should not be taken lightly, especially if the grounds for removal and relocation are ideological, or made in response to the digital mob behaviour of social media.
The case of William Crowther (1817-85) is an interesting one. He was a member of a prominent Hobart family of doctors and natural historians, including his own father and then his son and grandson who enjoyed distinguished careers in medicine, science, war and politics over the following century. He was an expert surgeon, a keen natural scientist and an entrepreneur with important shipping and whaling interests, as well as a member of the colonial parliament and briefly premier of Tasmania. Less than four years after his death, a statue was set up by public subscription to honour an eminent fellow citizen.
Crowther is controversial because of his alleged, and it seems fairly certain, involvement in a grisly, if scientifically motivated, affair in 1869. Darwin’s great book On the Origin of Species had only appeared a decade earlier, in 1859, and scientists were eager to understand more about the comparative morphology of different human families. Tasmania held a particular interest because the Indigenous Tasmanian population differed considerably from the mainland people.
By those years, however, over a generation after the end of the Black War (1824-31), very few individuals of unmixed Tasmanian descent survived, and just one male: William Lanne (c. 1836-69) – sometimes given as Lanney or Lanné – who worked as a whaler, was well-known in Hobart, and had even been introduced by the governor to Prince Alfred, the Duke of Edinburgh in 1868. When he died of cholera in 1869, he was buried at Saint David’s Church in Hobart, where Prince Alfred had just laid the foundation stone for the present Saint David’s Cathedral (consecrated in 1874).
Lanne’s funeral was a solemn occasion, attended by a large number of Hobart citizens. The Hobart Mercury reported (March 8, 1869): “Having been duly sealed, the coffin was covered with a black opossum skin rug, fit emblem of the now extinct race to which the deceased belonged; and on this singular pall were laid a couple of native spears and waddies, round which were twined the ample folds of a Union Jack, specially provided by the shipmates of the deceased. It was then mounted upon the shoulders of four white native lads, part of the crew of the Runneymede, who volunteered to carry their Aboriginal countryman to his grave.”
Behind the scenes, however, there was a struggle to secure a “perfect” Tasmanian skeleton for scientific research; the Royal Society of Tasmania, founded in 1843 and the first Royal Society outside Britain, wrote to the government, and according to the same article in the Mercury, “The Government at once admitted their right to it, in preference to any other institution, and the Council expressed their willingness at any time to furnish casts, photographs, and all other particulars to any scientific society requiring them. Government, however, declined to sanction any interference with the body, giving positive orders that it should be decently buried.”
The William Crowther statue as it was. Chris Kidd
On the night before the burial, nonetheless, someone stole Lanne’s skull from the morgue, as the article goes on to relate: “The dead-house at the Hospital was entered on Friday night, the head was skinned and the skull carried away, and with a view to conceal this proceeding, the head of a patient who had died in the hospital on the same day, or the day previously, was similarly tampered with and the skull placed inside the scalp of the unfortunate native, the face being drawn over so as to have the appearance of completeness.”
Crowther was suspected of having carried out this mutilation because he had wanted the skeleton to go to the Royal College of Surgeons in London. The Royal Society, concerned that the rest of the body might similarly be stolen, then removed the hands and feet, partly to render the remaining skeleton less attractive to thieves. They also alerted the governor to the need to guard the grave against possible robbery, and while this was agreed on, it seems that the Hobart municipality failed to arrange watchmen; the grave was opened on the night after the funeral and the skeleton removed, leaving behind the skull that had been inserted into Lanne’s head.
It is not entirely clear who was responsible for these events, although it seems to be generally assumed that Crowther sent Lanne’s skull to the Royal College of Surgeons, who awarded him a gold medal and a fellowship. His entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography (1969) states: “In 1860 he was appointed one of the four honorary medical officers at the Hobart General Hospital, but was suspended in March 1869 over charges of mutilating the body of William Lanney, the last male Tasmanian Aboriginal. An inquiry showed that two mutilations had taken place, the first at the Colonial Hospital, the other at the cemetery the night of the burial. Drs Crowther and G. Stokell, resident medical officer at the hospital, were suspected of the first, the Royal Society of Tasmania of the second.”
Whatever the truth, the story is gruesome, a window into another time and a world of which we can be highly critical but from which there is also much to learn. Perhaps it would have been preferable to move the statue to the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, where it will no doubt now be transferred and where it can be accompanied by displays that explain what we know about the events surrounding Lanne’s death and burial.
Simply cutting the statue down, however, closes off the opportunity for reflection; erasing the traces of the past may offer short-term satisfaction, but in the long run it encourages forgetting rather than remembrance and reflection. Is it not better to understand this episode and ponder its implications than to bury it under self-indulgent slogans like “decolonize”, which was scrawled on the statue’s base?
The most fundamental principle in this and similar cases, however, is the protection of public space in a democratic society. In a figurative sense, it is imperative to protect the public space of free discourse and open debate. Today that space is more than ever under attack from ideologues of different political orientations who seek to suppress or silence those who disagree with their views.
We saw recently the attempt by a city council in the west of Sydney to ban a book on same-sex parenting; but we could equally have seen another group trying to ban a book critical of the same arrangements.
Freedom of speech means accepting that those who disagree with you have a right to argue their case.
The preservation of freedom of discourse and debate is harder than ever in the digital age; this may seem paradoxical, since social media ostensibly allows everyone to express their opinions more promiscuously than ever before. But in practice that expression is quickly drawn into various competing maelstroms in which people vie to agree with each other ever more vociferously.
The same kind of mechanics endanger the physical public spaces of the modern city, the streets and squares and parks which are shared by all its citizens and residents. This public space must be one of order and peaceful process, where people can live and work and socialise in security and as much as possible in an environment of harmony.
The public space is one of lawful communal process. If, in this case, a monument is put up by the community, any decision about moving it must also be taken by the community (albeit in a different time and context)..
It is as unacceptable for a self-appointed gang to destroy a public monument as it is for selfish residents to cut down trees that block their view or greedy developers to demolish a heritage building for commercial gain or looters to smash a shopfront during a natural disaster. We must be unequivocal in our condemnation of the violation of common space in a democratic society.
In That Howling Infinite 