Daubed in red paint, graffitied, or rolled to the sea and thrown in.
The Black Lives Matter movement prompted a new push to remove or reconsider memorials to figures from the past.
This week, Hobart City Council voted to take down a statue of the state's former premier William Crowther, who in the 1860s broke into a morgue and stole the skull of Aboriginal man William Lanne.
Crowther, who was also a surgeon, sent the skull to a museum, and replaced it in the morgue with that of another corpse.
But Crowther is only the latest figure to fall.
Monuments to Confederate leaders were felled in the United States as demonstrators took to the streets in protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd in 2020.
The same year anti-racism demonstrators toppled a statue of 17th-century slave trader Edward Colston and hurled him into the harbour in Bristol, in south-west England.
There have been challenges to monuments to colonial figures across Australia, with a variety of outcomes.
Colonial history expert Professor Jane Lydon, from the University of Western Australia, says we can expect more calls for controversial memorials to be removed — but warns simply taking statues down could erase the history we need to face.
Massacre leader stands outside Perth Town Hall
Perth's statue of Captain James Stirling has drawn the ire of protesters because of his role in a notorious massacre of Indigenous people.
Stirling was Western Australia's first governor. The City of Stirling is named after him, and he is memorialised outside the Perth Town Hall.
He led the 1834 Pinjarra massacre, in which as many as 80 Bindjareb Noongar people were killed by an armed group of police, soldiers and settlers.
In June 2020, on the eve of a Black Lives Matter protest, the statue's hands and neck were painted red, and an Aboriginal flag was spray- painted over the plaque.
Perth's city council says it currently has no plans to remove the statue.
In 2021, a push to rename the City of Stirling failed, with councillors instead voting to "reaffirm" their reconciliation action plan.
New plaque on 'offensive' monument
Another WA statue, in Fremantle, memorialises explorer Maitland Brown.
The Explorers' Monument was dedicated to Brown and to three settlers found clubbed and speared to death in 1865.
Brown led a raid to avenge the dead men, in which as many as 20 Karrijarri people were killed.
In 1994 a counter-memorial was installed at the monument.
It reads: "This plaque was erected by people who found the monument before you, offensive."
"No mention is made of the right of Aboriginal people to defend their land, or of the history of provocation which led to the explorers' deaths."
'A desecration of our land'
John McDouall Stuart's statue went up in the centre of Alice Springs in 2014 — but it had been controversial for years before that.
In 1862 McDouall Stuart led the first European expedition to traverse Australia from south to north.
But he has also been accused of being involved in the killing of Aboriginal people.
The four-metre concrete depiction of the explorer holding a gun had long been opposed by some locals.
In a 2014 open letter, the Arrente people wrote: "We do not want to continue to live under the shadow of your statue and your gun."
The statue was given to Alice Springs by the Stuart McDouall Freemasons Lodge to mark 150 years since Stuart reached the town.
It was first unveiled in 2010, but was promptly returned to the sculptor after it emerged council had failed to consult its own public arts body.
It was finally installed in a park in the centre of Alice Springs.
Arrernte elder Patricia Ansell Dodds said the statue was a "desecration of our land, our people, our country".
"You’ve got a statue of John McDouall Stuart, what about a statue of our old people, they were here first but weren’t recognised," the historian and artist said.
She wants monuments to people like Arrernte activist Charles Perkins instead.
In June, Alice Springs Town Council voted to erect monuments to Aboriginal history.
Mayor Matt Patterson said this was because "as a community we have not been great at telling our own history and story. That has to change".
What happened to John Batman?
Then there's the case of the disappearing statue.
John Batman was one of Melbourne's first colonial settlers, and the namesake for the federal seat of Batman in Melbourne.
In 2018 the seat was renamed Cooper, in honour of Yorta Yorta activist and leader William Cooper, after Batman was tied to the massacres of Indigenous Australians in the 1820s.
Batman's statue, erected in the 1970s on Melbourne's Collins Street, was removed as part of a redevelopment, and has not returned.
Artist Ben Quilty had called for the statue's plaque to be "corrected". or for it to be destroyed.
The statue now belongs to Cbus Property, the site's owner. A spokeswoman said the monument was in "safekeeping".
A second monument to Batman at Queen Victoria Market, erected in 1881, has had two additions, first in the 1990s and then the early 2000s, recognising the "inaccurate" original inscription, and featuring an apology to Aboriginal people.
Reckoning with colonial past must be 'informed by Aboriginal views'
Professor Lydon says there will be more challenges to colonial monuments as we continue to learn about early settlers.
"This sort of re-evaluation is not going away anytime soon," she said.
"We’ve come up with evidence across the country, many of the prominent figures in Australia were funded by slavery, and also maintained slavery practices.
"There’s many figures, and quite a lot, to uncover."
While Professor Lydon believes Australia must reckon with its colonial past, she says there needs to be an approach that looks beyond "the single man".
"We just have to be careful that in removing these figures we don’t say, 'That’s done and dusted and we’ve fixed that,' and then it means we can forget," she said.
"We're seeing quite a scattergun approach, it's driven by public sentiment, it's often not informed by Aboriginal views.
"So I think we need to see the involvement of local communities and to ask them what they want — but to also involve historians."
