A king lost his head in Melbourne on the official royal birthday holiday this year. William Leslie Bowles’ bronze statue of the monarch on the King George V Memorial was decapitated. The sandstone and granite memorial was sprayed with red paint, and the words “the colony must fall” were written at the base. The activists released a video of their decapitation with a Sex Pistols song as the soundtrack.
2024 has been the year of the guerrilla removal of statues honouring colonials in Australia. Six statues have been knocked down, cut down or decapitated so far this year, not including the ones that have been sprayed with paint. Six statues and the year is only half over, for there is no reason to believe these actions will stop. The people doing it are working in a target-rich environment of statues of colonials and royals, especially if restorations put the same statues up again in parkland with twenty-four-hour access.
It has been nine years since the Rhodes Must Fall movement was started by students at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. It has been seven years since the anti-colonial ‘statue wars’ became news around the world. Five years ago, students at Sydney University campaigned to remove the statue of William Charles Wentworth (see my post). Four years ago, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement gave these campaigns extra momentum by emphasising the fatal consequences of institutionalised racism.
A few statues of colonial figures have been removed in an official process in Australia this century. The statue of Captain Cook making a Nazi salute in Cooktown and the statues of John Batman and William Fawkner in Melbourne were removed to make way for new buildings. The statue of the body snatcher, William Crowther statue, in Hobart, was planned for removal, but due to a court appeal over its removal, it was removed earlier than scheduled by unknown persons who had grown tired of waiting.
The people cutting down these statues are clearly very patient people who have waited to see if Prime Minister Bob Hawke’s promises of a treaty from the 1980s would occur in their lifetime—certainly not in Bob’s. Without a treaty, these statues as symbols of the occupation are legitimate targets for any resistance. Still, these patient people held out hope that the next government would be better than the previous conservative government only to find out it is more or less the same. Patient people are now taking direct action and trying to make up for lost time.
This is the first year that anti-colonial activists in Australia have cut a statue down this century. Previously, they were just splashed with paint. Statues have been damaged to further other political agendas, like the Gandhi statue (see my post); others have been damaged by apolitical vandals, like Adam Stone’s Fallen Fruit banana sculpture (see my post), while others, like the theft of Chomley, the dog in Anne Ross’s sculpture, Not without Chomley, from Gasworks Park in November 2023, have been stolen for their value as scrap metal.
The monument has been cleaned by a graffiti removal team, and George’s head will be reattached, but nothing will be done to change the structure that inspired the decapitation. Considering that other countries, like the US, have been able to negotiate solutions, as in removing the Robert E. Lee Memorial, Australia has a serious lack of political will or imagination.
Black Mark 