The statue of a former Tasmanian premier who beheaded the body of an Aboriginal man will be taken down after passing a final vote.
William Crowther, a prominent surgeon, broke into a Hobart morgue in 1869, removed the skull of William Lanne and sent it to the Royal College of Surgeons in London.
To hide what he had done, he replaced the skull with one he had stolen from another corpse.
Lanne, also known as King Billy, was a whaler and the partner of Truganini and a well-respected Aboriginal activist. He died in 1869, at the age of 34 from cholera and dysentery.
A conversation around the statue’s future has been going on for almost four years, with a series of artists “reinterpreting” it in 2021, including painting the hands red and draping the Aboriginal flag over it.
But on Wednesday night Hobart city council voted to remove the statue, 8-2, but the statue’s fiercest supporter, Councillor Louise Elliot, missed the vote because she was appearing on Sky News.
In a statement, Elliot said she “unfortunately” had a TV interview at the same time, which she chose to prioritise.
“My vote was indifferent as the vast majority (8 to 2) supported the statue’s removal and that was clear from the outset,” she said. “To support the cause I helped share the message of the statue’s disrespectful and nonsensical removal nationally.”
Hobart’s lord mayor, Anna Reynolds, said that, during Crowther’s period, Hobart’s medical fraternity broadly embraced phrenology, a pseudoscience that many scientists believed affirmed European superiority over other races. Phrenology, used to justify atrocities such as slavery, involved comparing the skulls of people from different ethnicities.
“It was based on basically a racist premise, trying to prove that Tasmanian Aboriginal people were the lowest of the low in terms of human intelligence with caucasians at the top,” Reynolds said.
“Crowther was certainly not the only person making transactions in this discredited field of ‘racial science’, but he’s the only person with hands-on involvement who has a prominent celebratory statue in Hobart’s main civic square.”
The statue’s plinth will remain an interpretive piece telling the “complex” story of Crowther, Lanne and society at the time will be commissioned.
It is not yet determined where the statue will find a new home, but Reynolds said the council was in conversation with the state library, the museum and parliament to see which institution might house him.
“It’s not about destroying anything,” Reynolds said. “It’s about saying that certain colonial figures, and the stories around them, are not what we want to celebrate and feature in our main civic square.
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“It’s more about a new chapter in our history, saying that we want to tell a more complete story … [about] a person was who was involved in a very questionable and controversial practice.
“Deciding to relocate this statue doesn’t change history.
“The records, books, articles, dates and stories associated with the statue will all remain unchanged.”
Approval of the development application for the statue’s removal can be appealed through the Tasmanian civil and administrative tribunal.
An initial vote to remove the statue passed the council 7-4 in August 2022.
Indigenous campaigners have pushed for years for it to be taken down, with a report to the council noting Aboriginal people expressed pain about its continued presence.
Crowther was suspended from his role as honorary medical officer at the Hobart general hospital after charges stemming from the mutilation.
He was Tasmania’s 14th premier and served for about 10 months from December 1878.
Tasmania’s heritage council earlier this month ruled the removal of the statue would have an “acceptable” level of impact on Franklin Square.
Reynolds has previously said the statue would be conserved and potentially reinterpreted.
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