MELBOURNE – Authorities in the Australian city of Melbourne will not replace a damaged monument of British explorer James Cook, for fear it will inevitably be vandalised again.

The granite-and-bronze memorial in the southeastern Australian city has been a favourite target of vandals, who tore the monument down last year, and scrawled “cook the colony” on its surface.

It was similarly defaced in 2020 with spray-painted slogans of “shame” and “destroy white supremacy”.

Stephen Jolly, the mayor of Yarra City in Melbourne’s inner suburbs, said the Cook monument would not be replaced because it would just be “damaged again”.

“I’m not in favour of demolishing statues of people in the past, even problematic ones, but don’t think if we put it back up, it wouldn’t be just damaged again,” he said in a statement on Wednesday.
“It would be ongoing. How can we justify that?”

Vandals poured red paint over a different statue of Cook in the lead-up to Australia Day earlier this year.

Statues of colonial figures such as Cook are frequently targeted by vandals to draw attention to the plight of Australia’s Indigenous peoples.

Cook sailed into Botany Bay in 1770, and claimed eastern Australia for Britain under the doctrine of “terra nullius” — land belonging to no one — brushing over tens of thousands of years of Indigenous history. 

– Nampa/AFP