Predictable outrage from the usual dreary quarters has greeted the call by supposedly “radical” University of Sydney students to tear down a statue of their institution’s founder, William Wentworth, because of his racist approach to Indigenous people.

While Australia’s leading tabloid, a few ultra-conservative historians and one or two hyperventilating, glorified DJs tie themselves in cultural knots over the students’ Wentworth Must Fall campaign, here’s the reality check: like many purported Enlightenment figures, Wentworth was indeed a racist who saw Indigenous people of this continent as inferior and their demise inevitable and desirous.

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Wentworth was many things, among them a barrister, landowner, statesman and advocate of press freedom. But he has been written most prominently into Australian history as one of the trio, with William Lawson and Gregory Blaxland, who crossed the Blue Mountains in May 1813 to sight the great pastoral plains of the continental inland.

They were, in fact, following tracks west from Parramatta padded down by Indigenous feet over countless millennia. And those rich pastoral plains had been hunting grounds and places of cultivation for First Peoples for just as long. But one thing about that expedition is undeniable though rarely contextualised in our national historiography: their expedition marked the formal vanguard of the white, colonial inland exploration – and the dispossession and rapid near annihilation of the Aboriginal tribes of the plains around Bathurst in war, through mass poisonings and disease.

Here’s how the white land grab proceeded after the trio crossed the mountains. George Evans, deputy general surveyor to Governor Lachlan Macquarie (another colonial figure with an ill-deserved reputation for human enlightenment given his appalling treatment of his colony’s Indigenes), followed them and went further west to “discover” what became the Bathurst plains.

Might Wentworth have known how the future would unfold? No. But there is plenty to suggest he was quite comfortable with the way it did

Percy Gresser, a shearer and amateur historian later of Bathurst who spent his life documenting the local tribes, wrote how Evans gave such a formidable report of the plains that Macquarie promptly decided to build a road over the mountains.

Evans, Gresser wrote, had a peaceful encounter with a group of Indigenous women and children at Wambool (the winding and meandering waterway that would soon be renamed the Macquarie River) on the outskirts of what became Bathurst. Evans gave them fishhooks, twine and a tomahawk. In 1814 William Cox, with a team of 30 convicts and eight British soldiers, built Macquarie’s road, which the governor traversed by carriage in April 1815 before raising the British flag on 7 May.

John Lewin’s 1815 oil painting The Plains, Bathurst depicts the earliest days of the settlement replete with the British ensign on the pole and Macquarie’s redcoats all about. No Indigenous figures are in it. So began the colonisation of Australian history; blackfellas were written out from the get-go.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The statue of William Wentworth at Sydney University. Photograph: JC Merriman

A member of Macquarie’s team wandered drunk and, perhaps, it has been suggested, desirous of female company, into an Aboriginal camp. Prescient of all the black/white reprisal violence that would soon follow, he was presumed killed and never seen again.

Free settlers and beneficiaries of government land grants crossed the mountains to establish farms around Bathurst in ever greater numbers. Soon there was no grazing land left close to town. The Macquarie River was overfished and traditional hunting grounds were being used to run stock. In a pattern that grew steadily across the continent, traditional food sources became scarce and the resentful Aboriginal people speared and sometimes ate stock. Shepherds who tried to stop them were murdered and, in a self-perpetuating cycle of retribution, reprisal parties and soldiers hunted down and massacred Indigenous groups and individuals, including the elderly, women and children, regardless of their direct involvement.

I’ve written extensively about the ensuing Bathurst War involving warrior leader Windradyne and Governor Thomas Brisbane’s declaration of martial law here.

This is what Wentworth’s exploration, undeniably, led to. Colonial expansion unleashed, the lust for more and richer pastoral lands became a battle for black/white primacy where the inevitable winner would take all.

Might Wentworth have known how the future would unfold? No. But there is plenty to suggest he was quite comfortable with the way it did.

In his 1820 book, A Statistical, Historical, and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales, Wentworth, reflecting fallacious white views about the inferiority of Aboriginal people and lack of affinity with cultivation and domesticity, wrote: “The aborigines of this country occupy the lowest place in the gradatory scale of the human species. They have neither houses nor clothing; they are entirely unacquainted with the arts of agriculture; and even the arms which the several tribes have ... and the hunting and fishing implements with which they administer to their support, are of the rudest contrivance and workmanship.”

So much of this is demonstrably incorrect and rooted in Darwinian white supremacism. He was contemptuous of the Indigenous people for the very reason that they clung to, and fought for, culture – because they would not be “civilised” by such white Enlightenment figures as himself.

He continued: “Thirty years’ intercourse with Europeans has not effected the slightest change in their habit; and those even, who have the most intermixed with the colonists, have never been prevailed upon to practise any of the arts of civilized life ... Frequent attempts have been made to divert them from their vagrant propensities, and to adopt some of the fixed occupations of social man; but except in one or two instances, these attempts have been utterly unsuccessful.”

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So, some of the students of Sydney uni – in the wake of the successful Rhodes Must Fall protest at the University of Cape Town and suggestions that other colonial statues in Australia have historically questionable value – want their 2.2-metre statue of Wentworth torn down.

It’s a matter for them and the university of course. I believe some statues – especially latter day ones, such as a 2014 monument in Sydney to Macquarie, that turn a blind eye to colonial excess – have no value and ought to go. I’m also for using statues as portals to challenge history’s integrity. And that’s just what the students are doing in their attempt to highlight the truth about Wentworth, whose moniker is also attached to a federal electorate and a building at the university.

The students would also be aware that another founder of the university and St Paul’s College, Robert Allwood, benefited significantly from the proceeds of slavery. Discuss.

Australia is not beyond renaming electorates that have honoured killers of Aboriginal people. Australian universities have done the same with buildings. New plaques have, meanwhile, been attached to old statues to illuminate the truth about their subjects.

More importantly: new statues should be erected to worthier figures that Australian historiography overlooks – not least, Indigenous people and women. Bring them on.

In challenging the orthodoxies of Australian history through Wentworth Must Fall, the University of Sydney students, active on the issue unlike generations of their predecessors subject to the colonial fairytale, should be lauded rather than condemned with reactionary outrage and harrumphing.

Regardless of whether Wentworth stands or falls.

• Paul Daley is a Guardian Australia columnist

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