University of Sydney students want to tear down William Wentworth statue

University of Sydney students have launched a campaign to tear down the William Wentworth statue claiming he’s a “known racist” and hope to “decolonise” the university, The Daily Telegraph can reveal.

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A campaign by radical University of Sydney students to tear down a statue of famous Australian explorer William Wentworth by claiming he was a “known racist” has been slammed as “an abuse of history”.

The activist students also want the uni’s Wentworth Building renamed and have labelled his crossing of the Blue Mountains with ­Gregory Blaxland and William Lawson in 1813 a “fraud”.

The students claim they want to “decolonise” the university and say their campaign — “Wentworth Must Fall” — is inspired by the “Rhodes Must Fall” protest movement in South Africa.

This resulted in British businessman, mining magnate and politician Cecil Rhodes’ statue being removed from the University of Cape Town.

University of Sydney students want to tear down this William Wentworth statue. Picture: Supplied

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The imposing 1861 Wentworth marble statue stands 2.4m tall in the Great Hall on the campus of Sydney University, which he helped found in 1850.

“Our immediate goals are simple: rename the Wentworth Building and tear down the Wentworth statue in the Great Hall,” students Himath Siriniwasa and Georgia Mantle wrote in student newspaper Honi Soit.

“We seek to decolonise at large, and platform the colonialism Wentworth represented. It’s a process of historical rediscovery.”

The campaigners erroneously say Wentworth came from an “aristocratic upbringing”, despite him having a convict mother, and also say his crossing of the Blue Mountains “ignited the flames of settler-colonial violence … that led to the death of thousands of First Nation people”.

The activist students also want the Wentworth Building at the university renamed. Picture: Justin Lloyd

“The ‘discovery’ as expected was fraud — the path was used by Wiradjuri, Gundungura and Dharug people for thousands of years preceding it,” they write.

But historians said Wentworth’s expedition has always been taught as the first “European crossing” and the push to “whitewash” history says more about today’s identity politics than shedding light on historical figures.

Eminent Australian historian Geoffrey Blainey said Wentworth did more than anyone to help found Sydney University — “the university in whose name they protest”.

“He was also one of the founders of a system of state education for children in NSW,” Mr Blainey said.

“He was one of the crucial promoters of civil liberties in 19th century Australia. He was somebody. Of course he had plenty of faults.

“There is a chance of only one in 100 million that any of these Sydney University students will do as much as Wentworth did for Australia. But I wish them well.”

Who was Australian explorer William Wentworth?

The university’s vice-chancellor Michael Spence earlier this year sent an email acknowledging the historic role of Wentworth, sparking a renewed attack on the renowned explorer’s legacy, including a claim in Honi Soit that he was a “known colonial-era racist”.

But Wentworth’s great-great-great-grandson Stephen Wentworth, a Bowral agriculturalist, said “you can’t whitewash or ignore history”.

He said his illustrious ancestor was involved in freedom of the press, established a newspaper called The Australian, was a barrister, a politician who helped draft the NSW Constitution and that his great grandson Bill Wentworth was the first Aboriginal affairs minister in parliament.

“It could be said, that if he hadn’t crossed the mountains when they did, the colony would have been abandoned and Australia would not be the country that it is today,” he said.

Mr Wentworth said he had not heard of the “Wentworth Must Fall” campaign, but added: “To know where you are going, you have to know where you’ve come from,” he said. “Rewriting history is ignorance, if you try to whitewash out history how do you correct it?”

Centre for Independent Studies senior research fellow Dr Jeremy Sammut said students should get their facts straight before they try to rewrite history.

Centre for Independent Studies senior research fellow Dr Jeremy Sammut said if the students were going to rewrite history they should get it right, as their claim that Wentworth was “aristocratic” was “a stretch given his mum was a convict”.

“It basically is abusing history to create a form of identity politics for today,” he said.

“These sort of pushes are very divisive.”

The Honi Soit editors and the students involved in the campaign did not respond to calls yesterday, but a spokeswoman for the University of Sydney said it had no plans to accede to their demands.

“There are certainly aspects of our founder’s past that are open to criticism … but we believe it is better to work to understand our history rather than erase it,” she said.

Originally published as University of Sydney students want to tear down William Wentworth statue