A stolen skull, a severed statue and an Australian city divided

A statue of renowned surgeon-turned-premier William Crowther had loomed over the park in Hobart for more than a century. But one evening in May, it was chopped down at the ankles and the words "what goes around" graffitied on its sandstone base.

It was a throwback to another night more than 150 years ago, when Crowther allegedly broke into a morgue, sliced open an Aboriginal leader’s head and stole his skull - triggering a grim tussle over the remaining body parts.

Tasmania had become the centre of coloniser efforts to eradicate Aboriginal people in Australia. And the sailor on the slab - William Lanne - was touted as the last man on the island, making his remains a twisted trophy for white physicians.

Some see Crowther as an unfairly maligned man of his time, and his effigy as an important part of the state’s history, warts and all.

But for Lanne’s descendants, it represents colonial brutality, the dehumanising myth that Tasmanian Aboriginal people are extinct, and the whitewashing of the island's past.

"You walk around the city anywhere and you'd never know Aborigines were here," Aboriginal activist Nala Mansell says.

Now the dismembered statue has become a symbol of a city - and a nation - struggling to reckon with its darkest chapters.

The extinction lie

Few places encapsulate the issue quite like Risdon Cove – called piyura kitina by the Palawa Aboriginal people.

Tucked beside a creek, a monument proudly marks it as the first British settlement on what was then called Van Diemen’s Land.

Nala says piyura kitina evokes complicated feelings for the Palawa

For Tasmanian Aboriginal people, though, this hillside on the outskirts of Hobart is "ground zero for invasion".

"It's the first landing and not coincidentally the first massacre [of our people]," Nunami Sculthorpe-Green tells the BBC one overcast afternoon.

Startled from their reverie, flurries of native hens - which piyura kitina is named after - scatter over the mossy grass as we arrive.

A wallaby hastily bounds towards sparse gum trees. It’s from that direction that Mumirimina men, women and children would have come down the slope on 3 May 1804, singing as they hunted kangaroos.

They were met with muskets and cannons.

The events of that day - and the death toll - are disputed. What is not contested is that this marked the start of a determined effort by British settlers to get rid of the original Tasmanians, nine nations of up to 15,000 people.

War broke out and Aboriginal people were hunted across the island, the survivors rounded up and sent to what have been described as death camps.

"If that happened anywhere in the world today, it would be referred to as ethnic cleansing," says Greg Lehman, a Palawa professor of history.

Warning for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers: this article contains images of someone who has died.

Ripped from his homelands as a child, Lanne survived two of those camps before living out his final years as a shipmate and beloved advocate for his people.

Even before he died of disease in 1869, aged only 34, letters show that powerful men in Hobart had begun scheming.

"There's no way that that young man was going to be allowed to lie in a grave. No way," historian Cassandra Pybus tells the BBC.

The theft of Aboriginal remains had long been normalised, she says, but reached a fever pitch in Tasmania as the number of its original inhabitants dwindled.

Lanne’s skull was sought to prove since-discredited theories about Tasmanian Aboriginal people - that they were the missing link between humans and Neanderthals, a distinct race so primitive they didn’t even know how to make fire.

Before he was buried, his hands and feet would also be cut off and pocketed by physicians. Some historians say his grave was robbed as well, and every bone in his body taken.

Crowther always denied any involvement in stealing Lanne’s remains - his backers called the allegations a witch hunt - but the town was horrified, and he was suspended from his honorary position at the hospital.

For First Nations people, who believe their spirits can only rest once returned to their land, what happened was especially distressing.

But within two weeks, Crowther was elected to state parliament, and he'd soon rise to be Tasmania’s premier for an unremarkable six months.

By contrast, Lanne's skull appears to have wound up on the other side of the globe at a UK university, and his people were soon declared extinct.

William Lanne was photographed by Scot JW Beattie before his death

Except they were not.

Today’s Palawa people trace their ancestry to a dozen women who survived, while other groups - which some do not recognise as Aboriginal - also say they descend from a handful of people who managed to evade capture in the 1800s.

Yet, for the past 150 years, Tasmanian Aboriginal people say they have been fighting to be visible, in the history pages and in everyday life.

The lie that they were extinct is largely blamed on outdated views about ethnic identity. But others say it was also a strategic decision - to deny Tasmanian Aboriginal people rights, and to snuff out their culture.

The impact has been devastating. Many Palawa people speak of being persecuted for their Indigenous blood in one breath and denied their identity because of their white ancestry in the next.

Even now, many feel there are huge swathes of their history missing - or wilfully ignored.

Nala points out all she was taught about Tasmanian Aboriginal culture and history at her Hobart school was a brief lesson on boomerangs and didgeridoos - although her people used neither.

And aside from a walking track named after Truganini - Lanne’s wife and a leader in her own right - there are no sites celebrating Aboriginal people around the city.

"The way they tell stories about Aboriginal people… they want you to think that it's somewhere really far away from where you are, and that it's something that happened a really long time ago," Nunami says.

Unimpressed, the 30-year-old history graduate started Black Led Tours to fill the gap.

Nunami has walked thousands of people through the city's black history

"I realised that I was walking to work the exact same way Truganini used to walk her dogs. And I realised that my parents met at the pub where William Lanne died. I also realised that the Crowther statue was right next to my bus stop.

"And I thought: does everybody know that this is right here, where we live and where we work?"

A disputed legacy

When unveiling the effigy in 1889, the then-premier said Crowther was not "a perfect man", but one who spent his time doing good.

His scandal overlooked, until recently he was remembered for offering free health care to the poor.

That rankles Tasmanian Aboriginal people like Nala: "It's just a kick in the guts."

As spokeswoman for the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre, she led a renewed campaign to take down the memorial.

"To us, it would be no different to having a statue of Martin Bryant," she says, referring to the gunman who massacred 35 people at nearby Port Arthur in 1996.

But some, like Jeff Briscoe - who lost the legal case to prevent the statue’s removal - believe the sculpture has priceless heritage value as the only memorial in the state "funded totally by the public".

"At the time, it was a significant memorial and everyone was proud of it. In 2024, should the perceptions of a few people override all that?

"It's not as if he was going around shooting people… he maybe had been involved in the mutilation of a body, but they all were.

"They’re bringing the bar down so low that no memorial from colonial times will be safe in Australia."

Jeff Briscoe standing in front of the now-boxed-up statue plinth

Cassandra Pybus says there is no doubt that Crowther did mutilate Lanne, citing letters he wrote. However, she had argued, like Mr Briscoe, that taking down the statue would set a dangerous precedent, because "everybody was racist".

She had wanted it to remain so the site could be used to educate people about how the first Tasmanians were treated.

The statue’s fate divided even Crowther’s living descendants, with some publicly supporting the calls for removal, and others distressed by them.

Hobart Lord Mayor Anna Reynolds says the council voted to remove the statue in 2022 "as a commitment to telling the truth of our city's history, and as an act of reconciliation with the Aboriginal community" - the first decision of its kind in Australia.

They did it after a rigorous consultation and with the support of the "silent majority", she adds.

Ultimately, she says, the statue is a sign of how desperate Crowther was to repair his reputation, not his significance to the state: "[He’s] not that important."

But while the council worked through red tape, some grew impatient and took it down themselves.

The vandals filmed themselves taking a power tool to the statue's legs

For Lanne’s descendants, their relief at the long-awaited fall of the statue is tinged with pain. They feel Lanne has been reduced to his death.

"He had a whole life... and just as he advocated for our people's rights, we will advocate for his story to be remembered and him to be respected for who he was," Nunami says.

Time for 'truth-telling'?

The Crowther statue is not unique. Countless similar landmarks or monuments - which joke about massacres, include racial slurs or celebrate alleged killers - are still standing across Australia.

Many, like Greg, believe removing or renaming them could be a natural starting point for the "truth-telling" the country needs, to reconcile with its First Peoples, the oldest living culture on the planet.

"You’d think that it was just a bunch of happy free settlers and not-so-happy convicts who jumped off the First Fleet... and bingo, there you've got modern Australia," he says.

"For Australia to have an honest and powerful relationship with itself, it must have an honest relationship with the past."

But after a proposal for an Indigenous political advisory body was defeated at a referendum last year, any movement towards a national truth-telling inquiry has stalled - though many states are setting up their own.

There are still many, like Jeff Briscoe, who believe a "truth-telling" process would be a divisive and unnecessary rehashing of the past – views echoed by a bloc of conservative politicians who also oppose a treaty.

"Nowadays people want Aborigines to stand in front of them and say welcome to our country. They want us to dance for them. They want us to teach them our language. They don't mind if we put some of our paintings in the mall," Nala says.

"But if you talk about… any type of benefit for the Aboriginal community, or taking back anything that was stolen from us, it's a completely different ballgame."

However she is among those who feel like the tide is slowly turning.

"The Crowther statue… is the first time I've ever thought, ‘Wow, white people - they're starting to get it'," Nala says.

Blak Led Tours Tasmania/Jillian Mundy Nunami Sculthorpe-GreenBlak Led Tours Tasmania/Jillian Mundy

Nunami hopes the Crowther debate prompts more conversations about other Hobart landmarks

The council was still deciding what should replace the sculpture when it met its unexpected end.

But many wanted the severed feet to remain in the square - as is - arguing they made a wryly "funny" and "profound" statement.

However earlier this week, the council plucked the ankles from their perch, to reunite them with the rest of the effigy, citing heritage law requirements.

But Nunami says even the now empty plinth illustrates the story of Crowther and Lanne far better than the statue ever did.

"We get to say we, as the public, learnt, we grew, and we changed the narrative of this place… Look here, we cut that down."

-BBC