Wooley: Now the controversial statue is about to fall, what should we do with the remains?

Instead of sequestering the metal remains of the troublesome statue in a secret chamber never to be seen again, can I suggest we give them to the geniuses Mona? Asks Charles Wooley

The William Crowther statue in Franklin Square Hobart. Picture: Chris Kidd

Collins Dictionary.

To knock someone off their pedestal.

Definition: to show that someone is not as good or talented as people generally think.

Sir William Crowther. Should we or should we not knock him off his pedestal?

Around the world it has happened many times before. Statues have been toppled throughout history. Sadam is scrap, Confederate Commander Robert E. Lee has been pulled off his horse. The British imperialist Cecil Rhodes has been effaced in South Africa, and at Oxford University there are calls to remove the man some consider “the father of apartheid”. And in most nations of post-Cold War Eastern Europe, they couldn’t wait to tear down the statues of Stalin.

In England, James Cook’s statue has recently been threatened by revisionist students of history because he was “a racist and a murderer”.

Churchill’s statue has been defaced many times, and there have been calls for its removal.

But where Hitler failed what chance the woke mob?

My favourite attack on statuary happened during the reign of Pope Pius IX (1846-78) when some of Italy’s finest Renaissance male statues suffered the indignity of having their genitals chipped off. All in the name of Christian decency.

Belief systems can be quite amusing if you can somehow manage to see the funny side – especially in this case because there is a Roman story that just won’t go away.

It is rumoured that the offending penises (“penes’’, if you must be pedantic) were stored in a chamber in the Vatican and are still there.

Phallus or fallacy?

The controversial William Crowther statue in Hobart’s Franklin Square, which is set to be taken down. Picture: Chris Kidd

Whatever, the Roman journalist who told me the apocryphal tale said: “I would give my coglioni to see them. What a story. It would go all over the world.”

“But if it’s true,” I asked, “why keep them hidden?”

“Because if they are really still preserved, the Vatican fears that some people will want to reattach them and then there will be terrible arguments and even riots. This city is full of crazy people,” he explained. “Still, it would be funny to see the experts with a bag of penises trying to find the matching statues.”

Meanwhile back to present-day River City, which outside of public life may be not quite “full of crazy people”.

Some accounts tell us that Sir William Crowther did good work as a politician and as a medical doctor among the impoverished of the colony. But it is also widely believed (and on balance quite probably true) that in 1869 he broke into the Hobart morgue and used his surgical skills to remove the skull of William Lanne, an Indigenous man who had died of cholera, and sent it as a specimen to the Royal College of Surgeons in London.

“Simply a matter of scientific interest. Nothing personal my dear chap.”

In the end it is Shakespeare who is always best on the fall of great men: their feet of clay, their fatal flaws and their overweening vanity, all of which will ultimately define their place in history.

Tasmanian Aboriginal King Billy also known as William Lanne.

Mark Anthony, in his funeral oration for Julius Caesar, delivers what must be Shakespeare’s best-known lines and indeed the most enduringly accurate:

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;

I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.

The evil that men do lives after them;

The good is oft interred with their bones.

There will now be a long and tedious bureaucratic process, but in the end we can be sure that old Bill, after this recent controversial revival, will be removed from his leafy perch in Franklin Square.

Thereafter I imagine he will be completely forgotten, as will his putative crime.

His deletion will leave a problem, common with history everywhere. If you cast villains into outer darkness, how will we remember and learn from the enormity of their crimes?

Worse, have we merely scapegoated one lone malefactor for the historical sins of a whole society?

Then there is the question of whatever to do with Bill’s immortal metal remains. As with the offending penises of old Rome, where do we sequester the detail? And should we?

I went down to Franklin Square this week to see him. Bill had little to say. There was no one in the park except for a council security bloke. I asked if he was riding shotgun on Crowther’s statue. He wasn’t, but he wondered: “Do you know what they are going to do with it?”

No, I don’t, but I do know by the time the dreary deliberations of some dusty and overly earnest committee of the Hobart City Council comes to a tediously worthy conclusion, we will all be bored to distraction.

The William Crowther statue in Franklin Square Hobart. Picture: Chris Kidd

The statue might even disappear from sight into some secret chamber never to be seen again. Just like Pope Pius’s stone penis collection.

Can I suggest instead that we hand the metal remains of Crowther to the geniuses at Mona.

Hobart, brooding under the shadow of the mountain, is a dead-set Gothic town. The gloomy alleys and stairways of the old colonial stone city are haunted by tales of violent death. Blood stains the time-worn sandstone.

Visitors love that stuff.

So, consider the possibilities. There’s Alexander Pearce, “the pie man”, an escaped convict who ate his fellow runaways and was hanged here in 1824. Oddly enough his skull is now held by the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Anthropology.

Then take the mad scientist, Rory Jack Thompson, who chopped up his wife and fed her into the city drains.

Remember the horrors of the penal settlement of Port Arthur, throw in a murderous bushranger or two and then add the Jekyll and Hyde character of William Crowther. By day a good doctor who cares for the poor, by night a decapitator who steals bones from the dead.

It is a feast of horror. Don’t tell me David Walsh and his creatives couldn’t serve up something salutary and unforgettable from all of that.

First, of course, we will have to recover Pearce’s skull.

Charles Wooley is a Tasmanian-based journalist.