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Canberra Today 15°/19° | Thursday, March 28, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

Gun-shy government stays away from statues

The statues of John Curtin and Ben Chifley in the parliamentary triangle.

“Those of us fretting about having foisted on us yet another statue of some boring, old, white geezer should relax. It is extremely unlikely to happen in our lifetimes,” writes JON STANHOPE in a brilliant column about… statues. 

I HAVE followed with interest and a sense of deja vu recent commentary about the commissioning of statues of former Prime Ministers.

Jon Stanhope.

The latest debate was kicked off by the installation late last year of a statue of Black Jack McEwen in the Parliamentary Triangle.

McEwen was prime minister for three weeks following the death of Harold Holt. He was at the time deputy PM and leader of the Country Party and certainly, for a couple of decades before that, one of the most powerful and influential politicians in Australia.

The debate about the McEwen statue is ostensibly not only about why him but also whether there are not other ex-prime ministers more deserving of being so memorialised and in any event the desirability of recognising other than boring, old, dead, white men in the triangle. 

Much is made of the fact that McEwen is the fifth boring, old, white man to be so recognised. The fact that there is a lovely two-metre high bronze bust of Alfred Deakin at the Deakin shops has been ignored in the discussion

The new statue of “Black Jack” McEwen near old Parliament House..

There are six significant statues of ex-prime ministers of Australia in Canberra. Of the six, four were commissioned by me when I was chief minister and minister for the arts and were paid for by the ACT government, namely those of Alfred Deakin, Ben Chifley, John Curtin and Robert Menzies. The other two, Australia’s first prime minister, Edmund Barton, unveiled by Bob Hawke in 1983 and McEwen, were commissioned by the Commonwealth. 

The four statues for which I was responsible were among the 40 or more works of art I commissioned through the public art program I established in the mid 2000s in my second term as chief minister. Sadly, the program was abandoned in my third term, for political reasons – ie because it was deeply unpopular.

The public art program was actively opposed by the Liberal opposition, constantly derided by the community and trivialised by the media. To be fair, a number of my caucus colleagues had also developed a serious case of the wobbles in response to the public reaction to the outrageous notion of spending public money on the arts.

Alfred Deakin’s bust at the Deakin shops… ignored in the discussion

The constant attacks, and the absence of any community champions of public art with whom to share the misery, did wear me down. I ultimately threw in the towel when I was presented with internal ALP polling which revealed, to my astonishment, that the public art scheme was listed, along with the arboretum, as among the top three reasons that people who had voted for the ALP in the 2008 election gave as the reason they were proposing to change their vote to another party or non-Labor candidate in the 2012 election. 

The Robert Menzies statue was the last piece of art generated by the public art scheme. The last significant work of art commissioned by the ACT government was, of course, the Skywhale, which was commissioned separately, in 2011, for the 2013 centenary celebrations. 

That not a single significant piece of public art has been commissioned by the ACT government in the decade since is an indication of just how gun shy and deeply scarred the government remains.

Robert Menzies statue on the RG Menzies Walk alongside Lake Burley Griffin.

To provide some perspective to the commentary on the McEwen statue it needs to be noted that it is only the second statue of a prime minister commissioned by the Commonwealth in the 108 years since the ACT was gazetted as the site of the national capital. I should say that I have no problems with it. I think it is a fitting and justifiable acknowledgement of McEwen’s service to the nation. The statue itself is fine, if a little corny, and a welcome addition to statuary in Canberra.

Now that the ACT government has abandoned the public art field it is reasonable to assume, on the basis of the Commonwealth’s record to date in the erection of statues in Canberra, ie an average of one statue every 54 years, that the next statue of a prime minister or indeed any person of significance, whether a woman or an Aboriginal person, will not appear before 2075.

So I think those of us fretting about having foisted on us yet another statue of some boring, old, white geezer should relax. It is extremely unlikely to happen in our lifetimes.

While it is now only of academic interest, if even that, I did at the time that I was busily commissioning works of art and unconsciously provoking every redneck and philistine in Canberra have in my mind a list of other statues I thought it might be reasonable to commission.

My list included Onyong, Miles Franklin, Nelson Mandela, Gough Whitlam, Billy Hughes, Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony, Charlie Perkins and Maj-Gen Sir Granville Ryrie. I also think it would be nice to have a statue of Gen Bridges’ horse, Sandy, who was shipped back to Australia following Bridges’ death at Gallipoli. Sandy was the only horse of the more than 120,000 shipped to the Middle East and Europe during World War I that made it back to Australia.

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Thank you,

Ian Meikle, editor

Jon Stanhope

Jon Stanhope

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