Warren Brown: Sydney University students are smearing name of revered William Wentworth

Through the decades Sydney University newspaper Honi Soit has had a stellar lineage of student editors but today seems to be wandering dazed and confused through the rubble wondering what it can put the boot into now, writes Warren Brown.

• Uni students’ campaign to tear down ‘racist’ statue

Since the beginning of the Great Depression in 1929, Sydney University’s Student Representative Council newspaper Honi Soit has been renowned as an irreverent — and often notorious — political satire and commentary publication, as you would suspect, laced with

edgy undergraduate humour and caustic opinion.

Through the decades the newspaper has had a stellar lineage of student editors, including Clive James, Laurie Oakes, Richard Walsh, Bob Ellis and The Chaser’s Craig Reucassel.

But now, in a smoking post-apocalyptic landscape created by a blindsiding Morrison win two weeks ago, Honi Soit seems to be wandering dazed and confused through the rubble wondering what it can put the boot into now.

The statue of WC Wentworth in the Great Hall of Sydney University.

In the latest edition, Hirath Siriniwasa has penned a call to arms titled ‘Wentworth Must Fall — a discussion about the decolonisation movement’ accompanied an illustration of three young figures — one wearing a T-shirt with an Aboriginal flag — toppling a statue of Blue

Mountains explorer William Wentworth in the same manner the giant statue of Saddam Hussein was felled in Baghdad roundabout.

Siriniwasa is taking up the cudgels to expunge the memory of one of Australia’s most important historical figures by removing any trace of his presence from Sydney Uni.

“Our immediate goals are simple,” Siriniwasa writes, “Rename the Wentworth building and tear down the Wentworth statue in the Great Hall. We seek to decolonise at large, and platform the colonialism Wentworth represented. It’s a process of historical rediscovery.’

This ‘historical rediscovery’, as Siriniwasa explains, has been lifted lock-stock-and-barrel from a South African University campaign titled ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ — precisely the same idea, to eradicate the memory of the controversial British businessman, mining magnate and politician Cecil Rhodes by ripping a statue of him from the university’s grounds.

The University of Sydney.

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Georgia Mantle, a Koori woman Siriniwasa interviewed continues, ‘The immediate aims are symbolic — but there is power in symbolism. That was what was so exciting about the Rhodes Must Fall movement in South Africa. It began with ‘f*** this guy let’s get him off our

campus …’

Cecil Rhodes was certainly a larger than life 19th century privateer, who possessed an even larger than life ego — (not many people could name a country after themself: Rhodesia) — but he’s a figure Australia’s recent history not even remotely entertained.

To try and place the template of Africa’s Cecil Rhodes over Sydney’s William Wentworth is drawing such a long bow is absurd — if not laughable.

The crosshairs are placed on Wentworth because with fellow travellers Blaxland and Lawson, he found a path across the Blue Mountains and, as Siriniwasa puts it, “This route into central and western New South Wales ignited the flames of settler-colonial violence, facilitating the frontier conflicts that led to the death of tens of thousands of First Nations people.”

But why not stick the shiv into Wentworth even further while you’re on a roll, “The ‘discovery’ as expected” writes Siriniwasa, “was a fraud — the path was used by Wiradjuri, Gundungura and Dharug people for tens of thousands of years preceding it.”

From the moment the first convict waded ashore Europeans were consumed with finding a way across the mountains to the west, having no idea what lay on the other side — pastureland? An inland sea? Some convicts were convinced if they made it across, they’d be

escaping into China.

Yet it did not take long for a growing colony boxed in by an ocean and impenetrable mountains to realise it was quickly running out of arable, living space.

The Hawkesbury was presumed to be the pathway into the interior, after all, all the great continents had a great river operating as a highway snaking to its heart — the Nile, The Congo, The Amazon, The Mississippi. But after many frustrating attempts to follow the

Hawkesbury, it was discovered it and the Nepean were one and the same.

Some 35 years after years after Sydney’s settlement, Blaxland, Lawson and Wentworth, an aboriginal hunter and several convicts set off from a farm at Luddenham at the base of the Blue Mountains to attempt to find a route across.

There was no trail over the Mountains — rather the expedition took considerable effort in setting up camp, dividing the party, marking out a path and returning to bring the others through. The plan was simple — follow the ridge lines — a plan they completed in 21 days.

William Wentworth went from strength to strength — as even Hirath Siriniwasa begrudgingly admits, “ … this actualised in personal wealth and political power” — an influence which helped establish The University of Sydney — the University at which he attends.

William Wentworth even had a federal seat named after him — one recently lost by Kerryn Phelps — perhaps that’s one reason to attack Wentworth’s memory.