Mackka said:
Very true mate , so why are they always having a go at Cook when he arrived in Australia 19th April 1770?
Mackka
Just for the record - the reason is because Cook claimed Australia as belonging to Britain when he did his 1770 exploration - he considered it "empty" because he saw few aboriginals. His reports prompted Britain to colonize it as a penal settlement and to declare Terra Nullius (that it was empty and unsettled land).
These arguments are mostly purposeless - most of us would not be Australian if it were not for Cook, those in the British government who decided to settle it could be claimed to have initiated the damage to indigenous occupation, or the First Fleet that started the settlement, or the Dutch and Portuguese who first reported the existence of a Great South Land. The whalers who predated the settlers possibly introduced the diseases that caused much of the damage (smallpox scars were noted on aboriginals around Melbourne in the late 1790s. long before Batman's arrival, and it has been suggested by at least one prominent historian that 75% of the Wurundjeri were wiped put in 2 smallpox expeditions that predated any settlement). What occurred was unquestionably sad and catastrophic for indigenous people, but was mostly not planned by government - Britain did not want to get Spain's record as a brutal colonizer and killer of tens of millions (if one bothers to read history).
Entire populations thoroughly approved of slavery for centuries (Britain, I think the Saudi's only abolished it in the 1960s - China abolished slavery and serfdom in Tibet when they marched in. So knock down any statue made of a person in Britain over hundreds of years? Want a demon, take your pick....
I can understand that people might object to statues of people like Hitler or leaders of punitive expeditions against aborigines (I am not aware of statues of the latter, and whites in the cities were still vocally disapproving of what was done, and some whites were hung for killing aborigines - to set an example). Who wants to walk past a statue of Hitler on every walk to the synagogue? However even then, perhaps stick the staues or their portraits in a museum not in a park. Otherwise we would have no knowledge now of what some tyrants looked like (eg Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan, Mao, Cortez, Cromwell, Stalin). We of Celtic descent should be knocking down statues of past British landowners in ireland and Scotland given the effect of the period around the potato famine and dispossession of the crofters, when more than a million died (if this logic is followed through). The dispossessed then did the dispossessing - such is life...it can be hard and unfair.
Limit it to a few tyrants and stick them in museums anyway...