Going for bronze

The Captain Cook Statue in Hyde Park, Sydney. Picture: Gordon McComiskie

The Bronze Age is usually deemed to have begun around 3300BC and lasted to 1200BC. But it should be updated to the era of Queen Victoria, when so much bronze was used in making statues of her and cannons for her. Sending her victorious in both senses.

It’s a moot point whether most bronze (an alloy of copper and tin) was required for the pint-sized empress’s military or monumental purposes. Victoria was a diminutive woman (five feet tall in the old money and 50 inches around the waist), though this seems to have been a state secret – like FDR needing a wheelchair. Thus the false impression given by her monumental monuments that she was a giant. And that was true in the sense that she bestrode the world like a plump colossus.

Take the king-size Queen Vic at the Hyde Park end of Sydney’s Macquarie Street (not to mention the other one in front of the Queen Vic Building). Ten tons of cast bronze glowering down on her abject subjects, a gigantic piece on Great Britain’s imperial chessboard. And multiply that royal whopper by tens of thousands around the UK and the colonies. It’s a wonder their sheer weight didn’t have the world wobble on its axis.

Macquarie Street, Melbourne, Brisbane… 90 per cent of our official names and addresses echo Mother England – HM, her PMs, rellos, oligarchs and apparatchiks. The entire states of Victoria and Queensland! Take central Sydney – hardly a hint of a First Nations name except for Bennelong and Barangaroo, the latter now shamefully dominated by Packer’s Pecker. And Sydney’s bronze Boadicea, our beloved Queen Victoria, looming on her lofty plinth, looks down on that most bronzed of bronzed Aussies, Captain Cook. This execrable eyesore should be knocked from its pedestal on aesthetic if not historic grounds. Because it’s a crock, a really crook Cook. Doesn’t look bronze at all, more like kneaded plasticine made by clumsy kids in class during Covid.

And that’s one of the problems with bronze – it’s too bloody durable. If such monuments were really made of plasticine they’d deteriorate as quickly as the reputations of many we choose to celebrate. For example, the aptly named Sir Thomas Bent in Brighton. Brighton? Another British borrowing. Melt Tommy and a few hundred Cooks down and recycle the metal for statues of Pemulwuy, Yagan, Jandamarra, Musquito and Barak.

Perhaps we should be relieved Australia didn’t have giant fizgigs of prime ministers hacked into the flanks of Uluru, back in terra nullius days when it was called Ayers Rock, whoever the hell Ayers was. It’s almost surprising that the Rock wasn’t besmirched with Deakin and his ilk, given the many ways we follow the US example. I’m thinking of Mount Rushmore, where the good and great US presidents seemed doomed and destined to be joined by the awesome countenance of the awful Donald Trump.

On an equally prodigious scale is the Statue of Liberty, representing all the noble ideals lacking in US life. Like the symbolism, the statue is hollow. None of your solid bronze – just wafer-thin copper sheets tacked over Eiffel’s iron skeleton.

We clearly have a thing about bronze – from the monumental to the sentimental. Parents have their baby’s booties bronzed, dancers their ballet shoes. Baseballs and golfballs deemed significant are bronzed. See do-it-yourself instructions on YouTube. Rejected by the National Portrait Gallery, I’m having myself bronzed, preferably after death, posed in a sitting position before a bronzed telly – gazing forever at a favourite program. Better that than a bronze coffin.