The Pulling Down of Statues Has Begun - Part 2 Update
Update 23rd August 2022 : The Hobart City Council on Monday 15 August 2022, voted 7 to 4 to remove the statue of William Crowther.
Many commentators and news agencies just take at face value the narrative that William Crowther had ‘butchered’ Aboriginal man William Lanne’s body as it lay in the morgue after his death, and that Crowther stole Lanne’s skull and sent it to England as a specimen. For example, in an opinion piece in The Age, Associate Professor Nancy Cushing writes,
‘This week in Hobart, the city council…voted seven to four to remove a statue of a man in a frock coat. It was erected in 1889 to mark the life of William Crowther, a surgeon, naturalist, entrepreneur and politician. Crowther was a controversial figure even in his lifetime. In 1869, he was suspended from his role at Hobart General Hospital for mutilating the body of William Lanne, who was wrongly regarded as the last Aboriginal Tasmanian man.
Crowther secretly removed Lanne’s skull, replacing it with one from the dissecting room. His aim was to send the skull to the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons in London where it could be studied, along with other skulls of racially diverse people…’ [our emphasis].
Professor Cushing puts some valid ideas forward as to why she favours the removal of Crowther’s statue, which is fine. However she, like most commentators, blindly accepts and repeats the ‘orthodox’ narrative that ‘Crowther secretly removed Lanne’s skull, replacing it with one from the dissecting room’.
As readers of our website Dark Emu Exposed will know, you can’t always believe the orthodox narrative - lots of historians and writers nowadays ‘just seem to be making stuff up‘ about our colonial and Aboriginal history.
Crowther always denied the charges against him. No evidence has ever been provided that proves Crowther stole Lanne’s skull. An enquiry could not find any evidence to convict Crowther of the charges.
Our view is that the orthodox William Crowther story is probably not as we are all being led to believe. To us it is shaping up as a concerted ‘hate campaign’ against Crowther by activists who want to topple a colonial statue, any statue, as way of making a dramatic start in the ‘decolonisation’ project in Australia. Statue toppling is already underway in the USA and the UK where a number of statues have fallen. In Australia, activists see Crowther as an easy first target.
But are the charges against him true? Maybe not, as new evidence and comments emerge from some surprising places.
The Tasmanian Circular Head Aboriginal Corporation are claiming that the activist Tasmanian Aboriginal Corporation (TAC), headed by several Mansell family members, are wrong about Crowther’s involvement. More worryingly it seems that the TAC buried the wrong repatriated skull - it seems that Crowther himself never sent Lanne’s skull to Britain and the skull that was repatriated from the UK, and buried by the TAC as Lanne’s skull, was actually that of an Aboriginal woman. Oh dear.
Cassandra Pybus, a prominent Tasmanian historian, said Crowther's crimes paled in comparison to other historical figures, including former governor Sir John Franklin — whose statue sits in the very same public park. Pybus, talking on ABC Radio to presenter Mel Bush (16 August 2022 - expired now?) said she thinks Crowther is the ‘fall-guy’ in this whole saga of pulling down statues. Pybus believes that the ‘skull-stealing’ charges levelled against Crowther when he was alive were most likely not true. Instead they were the result of a smear campaign by the Mercury newspaper and his political enemies, designed to weaken Crowther’s electoral chances in an upcoming election.
The statue removal process now is in the lap of Tasmania’s Heritage Commission who will undertake a review and call for submissions before issuing the heritage permit to the Hobart City Council for the removal of Crowther’s statue. We are informed that a large number of submissions are being prepared to submit to Heritage Tasmania calling for the retention of the statue, but with a dual-plaquing option to explain both sides of the history of William Crowther . We will keep readers abreast of developments.
Past News (6-8-2022)
The final decision by the Hobart City Council to pull down the statue of former Premier, William Crowther looks set to be ratified in the week of August 15th 2022.
Transcript here of Hobart City Lord Mayor, Anna Reynold’s, opinion piece on why the statue of Dr William Crowther should be removed.
Media Articles on William Crowther and his Statue
The ABC’s take on the controversy - 27 April 2021
Nala Mansell and the Aboriginal perspective - 30 April 2022
Other historians cast doubt on the claims - 5 July 2021
New Clues on William Lanne - 31 July 2021
Hobart City Mayor, Anna Reynolds, in The Mercury - 10 August 2022 (transcript here)
A Definitive Scholarly Chronology of the Controversy written in 1992 so pre-woke and probably balanced here
