No original thinking here —- While playing the role of the all round, decent and reasonable, nice guy, Stan Grant is dog whistling whilst curating and fermenting trouble with this stuff about Captain Cooks statue.
This is how it starts and it will be interesting to watch how this unfolds in the next few weeks or months.
“..It has stood since 1879. When it was unveiled more than 60,000 people turned out. The procession at the time was the largest ever seen in Syd…ney.
No-one present then questioned that this was the man who founded the nation.
But think about that today. Think of those words: “Discovered this territory.”
My ancestors where here when Cook dropped anchor. We know now that the first peoples of this continent had been here for at least 65,000 years, for us the beginning of human time.
Yet this statue speaks to emptiness, it speaks to our invisibility; it says that nothing truly mattered, nothing truly counted until a white sailor first walked on these shores.
The statue speaks still to terra nullius and the violent rupture of Aboriginal society and a legacy of pain and suffering that endures today..”