Bruce Armstrong is dead, but his sculptures will live on as symbols of Melbourne. They have become part of the city’s collective consciousness, physically present every day in people’s lives. Armstrong carved the bears, eagles, cats, and other beasts of our imaginations. His Eagle (Bunjil) unites Kulin, colonists and immigrants with an eagle drawing from the Jungian symbols in our collective unconscious.
Armstrong worked at a monumental scale. Two people hugging is monumental when Armstrong carved them. Even his small sculptures have a hieratic presence, suggesting they could exist at any scale.
My first memory of his sculptures was his two guardian beasts in front of the NGV’s arch. I remember walking past the huge carved logs and hearing some Aussie bloke ask his wife, “Do you reckon I could do this with a chainsaw?” Not wanting to say a discouraging word, I replied, “But will you?” Because it was Bruce Armstrong who did.
Bruce Armstrong, Two Persons Hugging, FootscrayGeoffery Barlett & Bruce Armstrong “Constellation”, 1997, wood and steel, detailBruce Armstrong, Untitled, 1986Bruce Armstrong, Still Life (Mirror), 1994
I could see this coming when I wrote at the end of the chapter in my book on art and crime in Australia, The Picasso Ransom, about the vandalism of sculptures in the statue wars: “…it is likely the statue wars will continue in Australia for many more years. This chapter may look like a brief introduction.” When I wrote that only the statue of the bodysnatcher William Crowther had been removed by the local authorities in Hobart. But, from horizon scanning, I could see a storm coming. Even when I first wrote about the now-removed statue of John Batman in my book Sculptures of Melbourne, I could see the storm coming. In 1991, the far-sighted activist Gary Foley put the statue on trial for genocide and other crimes.
In the first three months of this year, multiple Captain Cook statues, two Queen Victoria statues, one John Batman memorial, and one Cook memorial were vandalised. Covered in red paint, cut down or knocked over by anti-colonial activists.
In January, the same masked vandals sprayed two monuments to Captain Cook, one to Queen Victoria and one to St Kilda foreshore and Fitzroy, with red paint. The Captain Cook statue in St. Kilda was cut down and sprayed with red paint, and the monument in Edinburgh Gardens (in Fitzroy) was knocked over and sprayed with paint but has since been removed by the local city council. In Randwick, NSW, a Captain Cook statue was sprayed with red paint.
The British colonial approach to naming is confusing and repetitious, exhibiting both insecurity and an abysmal imagination—the colonial repetition of the same names, the same heroes on multiple plinths. The repetition is another symbol of the assimilation into the empire. The actual location, Naarm and its history are covered up as the colonials live life on repeat.
In February, another Captain Cook statue was taken out at the ankles at Captain Cook’s cottage in Fitzroy Gardens (actually in Melbourne and not in Fitzroy). Also, a statue of Queen Victoria in Eastern Park, Geelong East, was knocked off its plinth; it was quickly restored. A Captain Cook statue in Sydney’s Eastern suburbs was also toppled in NSW.
In March, red paint was poured on the monument to John Batman in the Queen Victoria Market car park (a prestigious location). The freshly reinstated statue of Queen Victoria in Geelong East was knocked off its plinth for the second time in just over a fortnight. “The colony can fall” was painted on the plinth. In 2020, I called for the orderly removal of this monument to find out Melbourne City Council’s response. They claim they are consulting with Batman descendants about its removal. These descendants appear to have a different attitude to Suzannah Henty, a sixth-generation descendant of James Henty, who colonised southeastern Victoria. She wants the statues of her ancestors destroyed.
I have to emphasise the symbolic nature of all these acts of vandalism. It is symbolic in that they haven’t taken away the bronze to melt down for its scrap metal value, unlike the scrap metal thieves, who destroy more sculptures yearly than political activists. It only reminds me that police have rarely arrested anyone for stealing public sculpture, and when they do, it is because of a tip-off from a scrap metal buyer or because the thieves were drunk. Public sculpture gets stolen and melted down every year, but these only make local news. The police have still not caught the person who stole the bronze dog, Larry La Trobe, from Melbourne’s City Square in 1995. Vandalism of sculptures only generates a media frenzy when someone symbolically damages a conservative icon of colonial Australia.
As I sat in the swing at Cambridge Park in Collingwood, making notes for a previous blog post, I never would have imagined it would be controversial. I sat in the swing because it was lunchtime, and there was nowhere else to sit in the small inner city park. It was also pleasant to swing gently back and forth; like a rocking chair or cradle, it is suitable for all ages. This post is about playgrounds, play, and relaxation and who is entitled to enjoy them. It is about playing in the urban environment; how is play designed for, and who is excluded?
The original swing at Cambridge Park
Public playgrounds, like public seating, are adjacent to public sculptures, as public sculptures are frequently used for one or both. Skateboard riders use Petrus Spronk’s Architectural Fragment. When I was a child, I climbed to the top of Peter Corlett’s Tarax Play Sculpture (for health and safety reasons, children aren’t allowed to do that now). Recently, I saw and climbed on Mike Hewson’s dangerous-looking sculpture/playground in Southbank.
Hewson’s playground, with its improvised and scattered appearance, looks like so many contemporary art exhibitions. It was also the least prescriptive of playgrounds; you have to work out if you want to use it rather than follow the dictates of a path. It was also less dangerous than it appeared; what looked like Southbank’s typical granite pavers were actually soft and rubbery. (Read Sanné Mestrom, Senior Lecturer, DECRA Fellow, Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney, on “This new ‘risky’ playground is a work of art – and a place for kids to escape their mollycoddling parents”)
Mike Hewson’s playground in Southbank
The Cambridge Park controversy was that the swing wasn’t a playground for just for little children. Now, the council is holding public consultations about options for adding traditional children’s playground equipment. I would have been unlikely to have sat in the swing if it was next to a four-way rocker or other children’s play equipment, for in our culture, children’s playgrounds exclude older single males and females.
“Will no one think of the children?!”
The online discourse about Cambridge Park exposes many prejudices, including those about who is allowed to play, what children need to play, and who can safely associate with children. These prejudices also affect the politics of public space. Considering demographic equality of access and declining birthrates, is the large amount of space dedicated to children’s playgrounds, particularly in small inner-city parks, currently justified?
There are anti-fun ideas in our culture that only permit children to play as part of a developmental aid to be cut off at a certain age. Should play be restricted to age? Why are they not given room to disport themselves? Should older children and adults only be allowed to exercise and play organised sports and games?
Thinking about the playgrounds in my area, little kids use public gym equipment as frequently as adults do. Next to the Coburg Senior Citizens Centre, there is exercise equipment for seniors, but it looks like a playground, only safer. I have previously written a blog post about the Wilson Avenue Urban Bouldering and noted how little kids found their own use for this adult play equipment.
They might be safe, controlled, and tested, but do playgrounds help kids’ culture, and are they more fun than a cardboard box or a ball?
On Sunday night, 25 February 2024, the statue of Captain Cook in Fitzroy Gardens was cut down at the ankles in an act of anti-colonial iconoclasm. In a video released on social media, two black-clad, masked activists use an angle grinder to cut the statue off at the ankles. The video is similar in style to the video earlier this year of the cutting down of the Captain Cook statue in St. Kilda.
Marc Clark, Captain Cook, 1973 (in better condition)
The bronze statue by Marc Clark (1923 – 2021), a Melbourne-based artist, was commissioned in 1973, almost two hundred years after Cook’s death. The statue was to promote the Endeavour Hills housing estate, which officially opened in 1974. This outer eastern suburb was named after the two hundredth anniversary of Captain James Cook’s arrival in Botany Bay; streets in the suburb were named after British colonial explorers. The statue stood outside what is now the Joseph Banks Medical Centre but was then the estate sales office. Basically, it was real estate advertising material.
I don’t know why Endeavour Hills no longer wanted a statue of Cook, but it was donated to the City of Melbourne and installed at the so-called ‘Cook’s Cottage’ in Fitzroy Gardens in July 1997. Clark’s statue has as much relationship to the historical James Cook as does the cottage, a name and a vague semblance – Cook’s mother would not have recognised either.
Yes, it is insured and can be repaired. The damage is symbolic and inconsequential compared to the Indigenous cultural sites, like the Burrup Peninsula, which are being destroyed or have been destroyed. It is minor compared to the number of public sculptures stolen each year to be melted down for their scrap metal value. These vandalism and thefts receive almost no media coverage, but the symbolic vandalism of a Cook statue gets coverage on many platforms, from the Guardian to Channel 7.
Why have a Cook statue in Melbourne? Not for any historical connection to the geographic location but because Cook symbolises British colonialism in Australia. Statues are erected for one purpose only. Statues of kings and other leaders were once part of religions and became part of secular honours when political and religious practices changed. Statues are part mortuary practices and part extensions of imperial power because they create a symbolic presence where there is an actual absence. They are talismans and idols. Their ritual use in religious and secular states remains the same; however, you want to explain their presence.
‘Effigies’ is the word J.G. Frazer uses in The Golden Bough, that classic study of magic and religion. In example after example from cultures around the world, Frazer tells how they are used as substitutes for the person they represent. Evil could be transferred to an effigy, hidden, often at a crossroads, so that the evil is transferred when people walk over it. Next, Frazer looked at effigies that are burnt on annual bonfires. This destruction of effigies was officially phased out as the images of kings dominated but remained part of cultural practice.
Internationally, as neo-colonialism expands through military occupation, acts of resistance to colonialism have increased. Only one statue of Cook remains standing in the state.
I’ve been exploring Geelong and visited the Geelong Gallery and saw some public sculptures and street art. Most of it was located around the Lt. Malop Street area, Geelong’s cultural zone.
Geelong Gallery needs both more space and a more substantial permanent collection. So it is very dependent on its current temporary exhibitions. When I visited, there was a temporary exhibition of John Nixon’s minimalist prints and an exhibition by women artists from the Aṉangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands (APY) focused on the Kungkarangkalpa (Seven Sisters, the Pleiades) story. (Curiously, they identify the same stars as sisters as did the Ancient Greeks.)
The permanent collection consists of Fredrick McCubbin’s Bush Burial, a Eugene von Guérard, a Jan Senberg, a Gordon Bennett and a couple of other paintings. The exhibition space for the permanent collection consists of one large room for paintings above one small room for ceramics, in between, on the landing, some nineteenth-century marble statues. These included one from Charles Summers’s studio in Rome; I will return to Summers, who believed he was Melbourne’s answer to Michelangelo, later in this post. It is commendable that Geelong Gallery has both a community gallery space and a learning space, as these spaces are much needed in regional galleries.
Mark Stoner, North
Mark Stoner’s North, 2000, has an ideal, site-specific installation. It’s large sculptural sails or fins forms are a waterfront landmark. Stoner is a Melbourne-based artist whose sculptures are like landscapes. He has public sculptures in Melbourne’s Victoria Harbour and other locations in Melbourne and Geelong.
What most of Geelong’s public sculpture lacks is site-specific installations. Some of it has been dumped in Geelong, like Charles Summers’s marble statue of the future King Edward. It was originally part of a set of sculptures of the royal family adorning the NGV when it was first located in the State Library. Nobody wants them now; Edward looks awkward in his ceremonial pantaloons and stockings. I’m unsure where they all are, but some are now at the Melbourne Show Grounds.
Charles Summers, King Edward
There is also an older generation of public sculptures along the Geelong foreshore with an appreciation for their location. Jan Mitchell painted bollards and the little bronze men or gnomes of the Poppykettle Fountain by D.G. in 1980.
Some bronze cranes were imported to Geelong in the 1880s and relocated to the Botanic Gardens in the 1970s (a few others scattered around the Geelong foreshore). They are from a time when public sculpture was donated by local plutocrats rather than commissioned and curated.
More recent public sculptures in Geelong include a collaborative work with a nautical theme by Julie Collins and Derek John. And Louis Laumen’s The Newsboy (the third statue of a paperboy I’ve seen in an Australian city after Philip Cannizzo’s in Caulfield Park).
Manda Lane & the community
Finally, the street art in Geelong’s city centre consists of a few pieces commissioned by Manda Lane, VKM, and Baby Guerrilla. The community colour-in-paste-up by Manda Lane, who usually works in black or white, is a fun, collaborative piece. Otherwise, there is one service lane off Lt. Malop Street with a few pieces. It is mainly by a local artist, Glummo, who repeats his glum character at various scales, from whole buildings to small paste-ups. Why is his character so glum? Do you know someone from Geelong?
A few comments about the recent damage to public statues of Cook and Queen Victoria in Melbourne over the Invasion Day (aka Australia Day) long weekend.
John Tweed, Captain Cook, 1914
Firstly, regarding the toppling of the Captain Cook statue in St. Kilda. Firstly, historically, the majority of decapitations, castration, destruction and toppling of statues has been done by monarchists, nationalists, fascists and other right-wingers. The Captain Cook statue in St. Kilda was the first statue to be toppled in Australia after the recent worldwide Black Lives Matter/post-colonial movement.
The statue was made by John Tweed in 1914. It is not a unique statue; there are several other editions. Tweed was married to a suffragette and doesn’t seem like a bad bloke despite being knighted.
It was donated by a wealthy industrialist, Andrew Stenhouse. Stenhouse had founded the Globe Timber Company, Permasite Manufacturing Co. and a mining company in Broken Hill and and lived in “Willyama” on Beaconsfield Parade in St. Kilda. He decided a couple of years before he died, to buy himself some civic virtue by giving the city a statue.
A hundred and ten years after Stenhouse gave the statue to the city, it was removed in a well-planned operation, with some angle grinders in the middle of the night. A night before, the security guards hired to protect it over the Invasion Day/Australia Day long weekend came on duty.
I don’t understand why bringing Cook down in the middle of the night was even necessary. I am sure if Indigenous people explained to Mayor Heather Cunsolo how they were victims of genocide and the statue of Captain Cook had long been used as a symbol of their oppression and loss of land, Mayor Cunsolo would simply remove the statue because she is not a hypocrite or a racist. Please see my earlier blog post about the City of Port Phillip censoring public art late last year at the request of a minority group.
Given it was in the same video as Captain Cook’s statue’s removal, it appears the same group cut down the Cook statue also sprayed the Queen Victoria Memorial. Only paint was applied, and Italian carved marble was not modified. Yes, the monument was imported from Italy in 1901, much to the chagrin of nationalists.
Finally, regarding the City of Yarra’s decision to remove the damaged and irrelevant Captain Cook memorial from Edinburgh Gardens. It was just a bit of marble with a bronze base relief portrait of Cook attached, which is not worth repairing or replacing. The bronze parts can always be removed, installed, or stored somewhere more appropriate. This decision will have positive results for their budget, the gardens and some of the most disadvantaged people in the country.
Notes and links about recent Australian art crimes in the last year. Since the release of my book, The Picasso Ransom, there have been more stolen and forged art. I am not considering writing another book because I’d need more scoops than an ice cream parlour, more confessions than a Catholic Church and more leads than a rock band.
New information was revealed about two of the crimes I wrote chapters about. Following up on the stolen Nataraja, the NGA returned to India; more looted art purchased by NGA Director Ron Radford was returned, this time to Cambodia. Serious questions need to be asked about the idea of a national gallery where loot and plunder are routinely displayed and what can replace it. And there is more to come about corrupt gallery director Ronald Cole, money laundering for a bikie gang.
Of course, the statue of Captain Cook was once again vandalised in the lead-up to Australia Day (aka Invasion Day) hours ahead of when the council’s hired guards watching over it. Unlike previous years when only paint was used, the bronze statue was ripped off its plinth at the ankles, a favourite tactic of copper thieves, but unlike the copper thieves, the statue was left where it fell. “The Colony Will Fall” was spray painted on the plinth.
Black Mark 