Sunrise criticized for panel discussion over Australia's white settlement

Sunrise criticized for panel discussion over Australia's white settlement

THERE is fury over a statue in Sydney’s Hyde Park of Captain Cook with a plaque that says he “discovered this territory”.

Critics have slammed the statue for overlooking indigenous Australians and Sydney City Council is seeking advice on whether the prominent statue should stay or go.

Another statue of Captain Arthur Phillip could also be on he chopping block.

The ABC’s indigenous affairs editor Stan Grant wrote an analysis on the issue on Friday and argued the statue represented a “damaging myth” that Captain Cook discovered Australia.

“What were we doing all that time, just waiting for white people to find us?” He wrote.

The article followed protests in the US about statues of Confederate generals.

A statue in Ohio was damaged by vandals who took its head from a cemetery where 2000 soldiers are buried.

Confederate statues around the country have been targeted in the weeks following a white-nationalist rally to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia. A counter-protester was killed.

Grant wrote indigenous people became a postscript to Australian history.

“History itself becomes a hymn to whiteness,” he said.

“This is what Captain Cook’s statue in Sydney’s Hyde Park tells us.

“The inscription that Cook “Discovered this territory 1770” maintains a damaging myth, a belief in the superiority of white Christendom that devastated indigenous peoples everywhere.”

Sydney’s Lord Mayor Clover Moore has sought advice from the indigenous advisory panel about the 126-year-old statue.

The Daily Telegraph reports Shooters and Fishers MP Robert Borsak slammed the political push to remove the statues honouring colonial heritage, saying it was “Taliban-like” and Liberal Upper House MP Peter Phelps and Aboriginal leader Warren Mundine criticised the push and said it was a “Stalinist approach” to create “false history”.

“What’s going to be next? Are they going to tear down the Anzac memorials in every municipal park in Australia?” Mr Borsak said to the Daily Telegraph.

Mr Phelps said Captain Cook and Captain Arthur Phillip were heroes.

“Attempts to rewrite our public history for the sake of political correctness — which is what these activists want to do — is little better than Stalin erasing his political opponent from photographs,” he told the Daily Telegraph.

Mr Mundine weighed in on the debate and said more statues of indigenous people should be erected across the country.

“All this nonsense about changing things — we cannot look back at history with out modern minds otherwise we would have to tear down the pyramids because they were built by slaves,” he told the Daily Telegraph.

“Trying to have a Stalinist approach and whiting out peoples’ names is false history.

“In Australia the problem is an absence of memorials, we need more about our own people, our indigenous people.”

— with AP