How Hobart, Sydney and Melbourne are reckoning with statues of colonial-era white men in an age of truth-telling

These misty-eyed monuments often paper over atrocities against Indigenous peoples – something that is finally being officially recognised Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast This is the tale of three cities and the same number of statues, two of them colonial era and one from early this century. All were erected to celebrate the experiences of prominent white men who lived in colonial Australian times and who respectively treated the Indigenous people of their realms barbarously, murderously and contemptuously. I’m talking about: the 1889 Hobart statue of former Tasmanian premier and thief/trader in Indigenous body parts William Crowther; the 2013 Sydney statue of the fifth governor of New South Wales, Lachlan Macquarie, a massacre commander who used “terror’’ tactics against Aboriginal people; and the statue dedicated in Melbourne in 1865 to the ill-fated explorers Burke and Wills and their expedition, who First Nations people might have been able to save had the explorers more readily accepted help instead of shooting at them.

The cities that respectively stage each of these problematic statues