Second statue of Captain James Cook defaced in Sydney
Police are hunting a group of vandals after one of Australia’s oldest statues of Captain Cook was ‘maliciously damaged’.
NSW Police are hunting for a group of vandals after one of Australia’s oldest statues commemorating the achievements of Captain James Cook was “maliciously damaged” in Sydney’s east over the weekend.
Police said the 110-year-old sandstone statue, located on Belmore Road, Randwick, was graffitied with black spray paint sometime after 8pm on Saturday.
Pictures taken of the statue on Sunday show the phrase “no pride in genocide” and the outline of an Aboriginal flag spray-painted onto the monument.
A NSW Police spokeswoman told The Australian that council rangers came across the graffitied statue on Sunday morning. The graffiti was cleaned off the statue by Randwick Council later that day.
The incident comes after two women – including a part-time employee of NSW Greens MP David Shoebridge – were arrested on Sunday for allegedly defacing a statue of Captain Cook in Hyde Park with the messages “no pride in genocide” and “sovereignty never ceded”.
A NSW Police spokeswoman would not confirm if they believed the incidents were linked.
Xiaoran Shi, 28, faced Parramatta Bail Court on Sunday alongside her friend Charmaine Morrison-Mills, 27, after the pair allegedly graffitied the statue in Hyde Park in the Sydney CBD with black spray paint at about 4am on Sunday.
Ms Shi is a member of the NSW Young Greens and is employed part-time by Mr Shoebridge’s office working on the Sniff Off campaign — which opposes the overuse of drug sniffer dogs on the public.
Mr Shoebridge said Ms Shi, who is also a former editor of Sydney University newspaper Honi Soit, was not working at the time of the incident, which occurred “well outside of work hours”.
Premier Gladys Berejiklian has called on Mr Shoebridge to apologise for the incident and said her government would “tighten laws” to discourage “un-Australian” activists from defacing historic monuments.
“This is where you draw the line when you have a staff member engage in an illegal activity, you either condemn it or you don’t,” Ms Berejiklian said on Monday. “It doesn’t matter what hour of the day it happened.”
The women both granted bail and will appear before Sydney’s Downing Centre Court on July 2.
Assistant Police Commissioner Mick Willing told 2GB on Monday that people who vandalised statues would be “locked up”.
“People are entitled to their views, but you’re not entitled to commit crimes,” he said. “If they do it they’re going to get locked up”.
The statue of Captain Cook at Randwick was unveiled in 1874 and was presented to the council in 1910.
The 12ft statue was one of the first monuments erected in Australia to pay tribute to Cook and describes the explorer as “the celebrated navigator and discoverer of this territory”.
Randwick Council has been contacted for comment.
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