Hobart City Council votes to remove premier William Crowther statue but appeal flagged
After years of rancorous debate, the Hobart City Council has voted to remove the statue of a former bone-hunting premier — but it’s not over yet.
After years of increasingly rancorous debate, the Hobart City Council has voted to topple the statue of a former bone-hunting premier – but a legal challenge is already planned.
The council’s planning committee on Wednesday night voted to approve the council’s own development application to remove the statue of William Crowther from Franklin Square.
However, former councillor Jeff Briscoe told The Australian he and others would immediately appeal the decision to the state’s planning tribunal, while seeking heritage protection for the statue.
“I will be appealing the decision, but I’ve also nominated the statue to be heritage listed,” Mr Briscoe said. “The statue has been there for over 130 years. Clearly, it has a lot of heritage. This is a political decision to remove it.
“I’ve seen plenty of contentious statues but what the local authorities do is put interpretation around it. Removing Crowther’s statue fails to acknowledge that at the time the people of Hobart funded it to remember a very good person.”
However, the decision was hailed by some Indigenous groups as long overdue in removing a constant reminder of bone hunting linked to discredited evolutionary theories.
Crowther, a surgeon noted for his work for the poor but also as a bone hunter, was in 1869 accused of removing and stealing the skull from the corpse of Aboriginal man William Lanne – a claim he denied.
Removal of his statue, erected in 1889 “by a grateful public, and sincere personal friends”, is thought to be the first felling of a premier’s bronze.
The Royal Society of Tasmania, which has apologised for its own history of Indigenous bone snatching, backed removal of the statue, telling the council it was “culturally unsafe”.
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