For months, an unusual monument sat in an oak-lined square at the heart of Tasmania’s capital: a pair of severed bronze feet.
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.
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.
