In broad daylight, two monuments were smashed in Melbourne’s Flagstaff Gardens last week. One of them was an 1871 memorial to the city’s earliest British settlers; the other commemorated Victoria’s separation from New South Wales in 1850. These monuments not only were sledgehammered, but daubed with the ugly words ‘death to Australia’ and the provocative, hateful triangle symbol of Hamas.
It wouldn’t be Australia’s national day without such acts of vandalism, meant to deface the anniversary of the day a British convict settlement was proclaimed at Sydney. Last year, it was statues of James Cook, the man who, until the 1970s, was hailed and celebrated as Australia’s discoverer. These acts of destruction against symbols of Australia’s colonial past carry their own symbolism, the perpetrators’ acts of defiance against a nation and society they abhor.
