Turnbull says no to ‘rewriting history’

Malcolm Turnbull has spoken out against ‘rewriting history’, ‘editing statues’ and ‘deleting Australia Day’.

Malcolm Turnbull has attacked Stan Grant for ‘trying to edit our history’.

Malcolm Turnbull has spoken out against “rewriting history”, “editing statues” and “deleting Australia Day” to help reconciliation with indigenous people, dismissing the idea as a Stalinist exercise to blank out parts of history.

The Prime Minister yesterday rebuffed a campaign by several Greens-backed local councils to dump Australia Day because the date might offend some Aborigines, and disagreed with calls by ABC indigenous affairs editor Stan Grant to amend the inscription of a Captain Cook statue and others.

“I’m an admirer of Stan’s but he is dead wrong here. Trying to edit our history is wrong,’’ Mr Turnbull told Melbourne radio 3AW. “Now all of those statues, all of those monuments, are part of our history and we should respect them and preserve them. And by all means, put up other monuments, put up other statues and signs and sites that explain our history.

“We have a rich history, and that’s why I’ve defended, so strongly, Australia Day.”

Grant kicked off debate on historical symbols a week ago, writing a column in which he said Captain Cook’s statue in Sydney’s Hyde Park with the inscription “Discovered this territory 1770” falsely ignored Aborigines and ­violence committed against them.

His column followed US racial violence prompted by the removal of Confederate civil war statues.

Under a heading “monuments to hate’’, Grant also wrote that every time he drove across the Blue Mountains to visit the country of his ancestral Wiradjuri people, he was reminded how explorer William Cox was “immortalised” by having his name lent to the landscape.

Recalling an “exterminating war” in the 1820s between the ­Wiradjuri and the British, Grant quoted Blood on the Wattle, a book by Bruce Elder first published in 1988, that attributed to William Cox the quote that “the best thing that could be done is to shoot all the blacks and manure the ground with their carcasses”.

Elder admitted yesterday he was possibly wrong in naming William Cox. He agreed the quote might be more correctly attributed to George Cox, a land owner whose workers, according to a 1977 history by Y.T. Yarwood, killed 16 Aborigines after cattle were reported missing.

Elder said yesterday he had used only secondary sources for his book, and far fewer sources ­existed at the time. He had not heard of George Cox, he said, and had probably relied on quoted ­material from a “do-gooder” ­minister of religion, Lancelot Threlkeld.

Elder said Gippsland settler Angus McMillan deserved to have local statues of him torn down after massacring Aborigines. But on the identity of Cox he said: “Sounds like I got it wrong.’’

Grant said he accepted Cox the explorer might have been confused with Cox the pastoralist, whom he had never heard of. He stressed he had sourced Elder’s book.

“This is the problem with a lot of indigenous history because so much of it, particularly on our side, is never recorded,’’ he said.

“Whenever you write about these things, there has to be attribution. That’s why, when I write about things, I say ‘written in this book’, ‘according to this person’. That’s why you attribute, and that’s what history is.”

Mr Turnbull said he did not ­believe a push to rewrite Australia’s history had much momentum, and branded it a Labor-left-Green fringe issue.

“We can’t get into this, sort of Stalinist exercise of trying to white-out or obliterate or blank-out parts of our history,’’ he said.