Rosemary McLeod: History is more than just a statue

The statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee has been toppled in Charlottesville. Photo/Getty Images

Wellington can claim the ugliest public statues in the country, if not the world, and I would gladly see them toppled. But unlike the people of Charlottesville, who have toppled a statue of Civil War general Robert E. Lee, I would start with the recent ones.

They are variously dismal, but we're condemned to live with them in places where they can't be avoided, like the giant concrete seashells on Lambton Quay, only I fear they're so solid and ugly that they'll outlive eternity.

The nearby elongated Katherine Mansfield figure isn't much better, with its long metal "dress" of jumbled-up words as if she was a hanger-on in Harry Potter's world, casting cutesy spells.

There are more on my hit-list, like the sculpture park of concrete blobs behind Parliament. If I were a vulgar person I'd say they reminded me of something vulgar. But I'm not.

It wouldn't matter so much if they were only meant to last for 10 years or so before new ugliness replaced them, but they lay claim to significance because they are large, and because we were given them as unwelcome gifts that have to stay, like wedding presents that are only pulled out of a box in the garage when the giver infrequently visits. A tree would be better. In every case.

My objections are aesthetic and irritable, but most people's worries about statues seem to be political. That is more fraught, like the example of General Lee, who history has adored but thinking people now deplore.

In the dark and murky world of alt-right American politics he is revered as a white supremacist and racist, though when the Civil War was over he said, "I am rejoiced to see that slavery is abolished ... I would have cheerfully lost all that I have lost by the war, and have suffered all that I have suffered, to have this object attained." If he actively pursued slavery before, it seems he woke up to himself.

Lee won't care if all his statues in the South are now pulled down, and racism is vile, so I get why it happened, yet we can't erase history entirely because we need to learn from it.

Statues, in themselves embodiments of ideas, are in the firing line of change.

The Taleban's destruction of the giant standing Buddhas of Bamiyan, Afghanistan, didn't destroy Buddhism, but they showed just how far radical Islamists could go in offending the world.

It wasn't just Buddhists, or Afghanis, who would be upset by that vandalism. The statues, which had minded their own business for more than 1000 years, had earned the right to belong to all of us.

Bigotry - as in right-wing extremists in Charlottesville and elsewhere - holds huge appeal for people who fear change and think their rights are being eroded when other people assert theirs.

We had our own battle with a statue in 1995, when Whanganui Maori occupied the town's Moutoa Gardens for 79 days.

Someone decapitated a statue of former prime minister John Ballance there, in protest against the memorials in the park celebrating Maori who collaborated with the government in the Land Wars of the 1860s.

It's not hard to see why the runanga Pakaitore would be angry at a memorial for those who had died "in defence of law and order against fanaticism and barbarism". Whose law, they might ask, and whose barbarism?

Ballance organised a volunteer cavalry corps in Titokowaru's War of 1878-79, another reason why Maori might not have any time for him, while the rest of us can't remember anything about him.

A replacement statue was commissioned, presumably by the indignant local council, in 2009, and placed outside the district court buildings, for safekeeping maybe.

Meanwhile a statue of Major Kemp (Te Keepa Te Rangihiwinui), a Maori military commander and ally of the government in the 19th century, remains - maybe because he had a prestigious ancestry.

The protest ended with an agreement that Maori and Pakeha would jointly administer the park. Local mayors fulminated against the "h" being put back in Whanganui at about this time, on the basis that we knew more than Maori about how their language was spoken a century and a half ago. They lost that battle.

Rosemary McLeod is a journalist and author.