Australia’s leading Anglo-Celtic advocacy group has launched a campaign to save the country’s monuments and place names, and called on police to do more to stop Anglophobic attacks.
The British Australia Community (BAC) said its Name Back campaign was created to protect “Australia’s Anglo-Celtic heritage from the growing trend of historical erasure, wokeness and cancellation”, and draws attention to 35 recent attacks on statues, memorials and monuments.
“These are not random acts of defacement – they are deliberate, targeted attacks designed to undermine our proud national identity and erase our memory,” the BAC said on the Name Back website.
The campaign also focuses on undemocratic name changes, noting that across Australia historic place names are being changed without public consultation or consent, including Berwick Springs Lake in Melbourne’s recent renaming to Guru Nanak Lake after the founder of Sikhism.
“While many Aboriginal names for natural landmarks and features were acknowledged and respected by settlers, it is now exclusively Anglo-Celtic and European names that are being targeted,” the BAC said.
“These changes sever our connection to the past and disrespect the legacy of the largely Anglo-Celtic pioneers who built this nation – establishing towns, cities, administrative regions, ports, parks, and roads that have stood for generations.”
The campaign was launched on Friday, just hours after two separate attacks on public monuments – the vandalism of 20 bronze busts of Australian prime ministers in Ballarat, Victoria, and the defacing of a statue of Captain Cook in Randwick, Sydney.
In the first incident about 20 statues were damaged in the Ballarat Botanical Gardens, and the statue heads of two former prime ministers were removed and stolen, while in the second red paint was splashed on the stone statute of Cook and pieces were broken off, including the explorer’s nose and hand.
BAC President Harry Richardson addresses the incidents in an open letter to the country’s police ministers asking for a dedicated police guard to protect prominent monuments in the lead-up to Australia Day.
“The British Australian Community is concerned that continuing ambivalence to the desecration of our monuments sends a signal to politically-motivated extremists that not only are the physical monuments to Australia’s British heritage open targets for ongoing attack, but also that Australia’s British-descended population are similarly ripe targets for attack,” he wrote.
“The British Australian Community thanks police forces nationwide for their indefatigable work protecting our communities and hopes our political representatives will do the right thing and mount a defence of our nation’s British heritage.”
The campaign launch comes a week after left-wing extremists tried to destroy Melbourne’s Queen Victoria Memorial.
Header image: Left, the Name Back campaign (BAC). Right, damage to the Captain Cook statue in Randwick (Randwick Mayor Dylan Parker).
