Nothing divides community sentiments about the history of Australia’s violent frontier quite like a vandalised statue dedicated to a killer of Indigenous people.

And so it was in 2017 after the vandalisation of statues dedicated to James Cook, the man who purportedly “discovered” Australia, and Lachlan Macquarie, the “gentleman” fifth governor of New South Wales who ordered his red coats to employ the tactic of “terror” in slaughtering the colony’s Aboriginal people in 1816.

These acts of public vandalism (wrong and unacceptable) were certainly polarising: from one side came the calls to tear down or amend these and similar statues to give a fuller picture of the men they memorialised, while from the other came pleas to better protect such monuments.

So how to settle all this? The minister for environment and energy, Josh Frydenberg, asked his department’s Heritage Council to inquire into the “protections for places and monuments that relate to Australia’s early colonial history and interactions between European explorers and settlers and Australia’s Indigenous peoples”.

As cans of worms go, they don’t really get too much wrigglier. The Australian Heritage Council has responded with a thoughtful analysis of some of the underlying issues of the “statue wars”, as some dubbed it, and recommendations about how to avert a replay.

While the council determined that historic heritage legislation, various government anti-graffiti and criminal legislation was sufficient to protect colonial monuments from wilful damage, there was “a need however to consider the adequacy of protection for Indigenous heritage places at the state and Commonwealth levels ... there is scope to improve the effectiveness of Indigenous heritage legislation ...”

“Contact with Europeans and the conflicts that ensued during the period of colonisation were recorded and commemorated by Aboriginal people in rock art and other special places. Rock art has been described by Aboriginal elders as their history books; the largest sites libraries. Some of the paintings, such as those of ships, were reproduced in exquisite detail from sightings tens of kilometres away, and after days, weeks, or months had passed.”

I’ve long argued the need to change the names afforded to state and federal electorates, suburbs and some public places

The committee suggested Australia could foster greater engagement with colonial monuments and places by “providing a more balanced representation of our history”.

This recommendation seems especially salient as (non-Indigenous) Australia nears the end of the four year, $600m commemoration of Anzac 100 and prepares to spend big to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Cook’s departure from England on Endeavour and the subsequent “discovery” including with yet another ($47m) memorial to the great man.

The committee advised: “The Council notes the important opportunity these anniversaries provide for discussion, and to bring attention to, remember and pay respect to the stories of the Indigenous peoples involved and the significant changes that occurred as a result of these expeditions.”

These anniversaries should, the committee recommends, “be recognised at the national level as an opportunity for recognition and promotion of the Aboriginal and shared history of the Cook landings and the colonial period that followed” and that “consideration [should] be given by those responsible for colonial heritage sites to the most appropriate way to tell Indigenous stories of Australia’s settlement in addition to stories of British arrival and colonisation; and that colonial sites be recognised as part of a shared heritage”.

I’ve long argued the need to change the names afforded to state and federal electorates, suburbs and some public places – including buildings on university campuses and elsewhere – and geographic landmarks, dedicated to murderers of Indigenous Australians. Among others I’ve cited the electorates of Batman (recently re-named to Cooper after Yorta Yorta activist William Cooper), McMillan, Canning and Forrest.

I also believe that colonial-era and later statues that lionise figures such as Batman (a syphilitic grifter who struck a meaningless treaty with custodians of the country around Melbourne after his involvement in some of the worst violence against the Tasmanians) should be given additional plaques to more fully explain the subjects’ deeds.

Colonial-era and early federation statues do not of themselves teach us history. They reflect moments in time – often racist attitudes to the Indigenous victims of European colonisation, and simultaneous public relations efforts to affirm the righteousness of white “settlement”.

Yes, they can be portals to inquiry that lead to honest history, just as they have proven to be starters of conversations in recent years about the brutal truth of the widespread murders of Indigenous people on the colonial and federation frontiers.

But some statues – erected in colonial times or much later to men of the era – arguably have little intrinsic historic or cultural value at all. The most recent Sydney statue honouring Macquarie, for example, I believe has absolutely none given all that was known about him when the memorial – deeming him a “perfect gentleman” – was dedicated in 2013.

The Heritage Council report notes the media discussion about whether “monuments should be removed, replaced, or expanded upon” and the “calls for the removal of statues of colonial figures because of their treatment of Indigenous Australians”.

An example of a successful move to “expand” a monument is the Maitland Brown Memorial (“the Explorers’ Monument”) in Fremantle, Western Australia, whose original 1913 description of events it depicted “caused division due to its one-sided account, the viewpoint of the early European settlers”.

In 1994, the United Nations Year of Indigenous Peoples, a “counter-memorial” in the form of a second plaque – acknowledging the right of Indigenous people to defend country and commemorating “all those Aboriginal people who died during the invasion of their country” was added by the local Indigenous community.

Significantly, the heritage council observed: “The addition of the new plaque didn’t edit history, but added to the story. It is a striking example of how a dialogue can occur in memorialisation where one view of the past takes issue with another and history is seen, not as some final statement, but a contingent and contested narrative ... Expansion could see colonial monuments turned into points of reflection and tools for education, instead of attempts to ‘tidy up the past’ by their removal.”

The council points out monuments to frontier war are limited and localised, although there have been suggestions a memorial ought to be “sited with prominence in the nation’s capital between the War Memorial and Parliament House, to commemorate the Indigenous battles in a spatially and philosophically significant location”.

The Heritage Council said that at November 2017 there were some 30,626 monuments across all themes and periods in Australia – 520-plus in Melbourne, a city whose commemorative landscape mostly represents colonial “civic leadership and patriotic and heroic achievement”.

“Monuments recording the achievements of men greatly outnumber those recording the achievements of women.”

Which goes to show, of course, how very much more Australia’s commemorative landscape needs to change to reflect the diversity of who we are and, not least, the truth about our history.

And after almost 120 years of post-colonial we should expect and encourage ever more “contested narratives”.

• Paul Daley is a Guardian Australia columnist