Andrew Bolt on destroying cultural heroes: If we demand purity, who will escape whipping?
IF WE go looking for unpopular truths, nobody’s cultural heroes will come out untarnished, writes Andrew Bolt.
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THE Taliban Left — now destroying monuments and Australia Day — seems strangely selective in its targets.
Melbourne University has already stripped the name of famous anatomist Richard Berry from its maths building.
Originally, Berry’s sin was to collect and research remains of long-dead Aborigines, now a tribal taboo. He’s now also despised as a eugenicist, saying in 1930 a “lethal chamber” was the “wisest and best thing” for the extinction of “the grosser types of our mental defectives”. Ugly.
Melbourne University has already stripped the name of famous anatomist Richard Berry from its maths building.
Originally, Berry’s sin was to collect and research remains of long-dead Aborigines, now a tribal taboo. He’s now also despised as a eugenicist, saying in 1930 a “lethal chamber” was the “wisest and best thing” for the extinction of “the grosser types of our mental defectives”. Ugly.
This year Darebin council also stripped the name of John Batman, Melbourne’s founder, from a park for having killed Aborigines in Tasmania.
Now ABC star Stan Grant wants to change the inscription on Captain Cook’s statue in Sydney’s Hyde Park that says Cook “discovered this territory”.
Grant says that’s a damaging lie for Aborigines like him. Yet Cook was indeed the first man to map our eastern coast and the first European to find it. Do we need reminding Aborigines were here already?
Time out. If we’re to demand purity (by modern standards) of everyone we’ve honoured with statues or plaques, who will escape whipping?
We’d have to destroy statues of great prime ministers such as the Liberals’ Sir Robert Menzies and Labor’s John Curtin, who believed in a White Australia policy, now deemed racist.
Artists would have to ban the Archibald art prize, named after the founder of the Bulletin magazine with its slogan, “Australia for the White Man”.
But does Grant really want such “a full reckoning of our nation’s past” when he’s promoting fake history himself as he rages in his well cut jackets over Aboriginal “injustice” — “our suffering, our humiliation”.
For instance, he claims whites poisoned Poisoned Waterholes Creek, near Narrandera, causing “many” Aborigines to die. But Narrandera historian George Gow in 1951 blamed poet Mary Gilmore for spreading that myth in the Sydney Morning Herald, where she claimed some magistrate “ordered that the holes be filled in up to a height of 12 feet”, which her uncle allegedly did.
Yet the holes remain unfilled.
Grant also promotes the “stolen generations” — the claim that thousands of children were “stolen” just for being Aboriginal.
But courts have found just one “stolen” child, a boy secretly taken from an Adelaide hospital by a welfare worker convinced he’d been abandoned.
Sure, expose unpopular truths. But does Grant really want that?
Originally published as Andrew Bolt on destroying cultural heroes: If we demand purity, who will escape whipping?
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