Three years ago, to some controversy, my local council changed the name of our part of inner-northern Melbourne from Moreland to Merri-bek, a Woi-wurrung word meaning “rocky country.” Moreland — itself a relatively recent creation — had been named after one of the area’s best-known roads, which in turn took the name of a sugar plantation in Jamaica owned by a Scots family. A descendant of that family, Farquhar McCrae, bought a swathe of land in what is now Merri-bek after he settled in colonial Melbourne.
McCrae’s forebears amassed a large fortune from slavery and then benefited again when the British government “compensated” estate owners for the abolition of slave labour in 1833. Farquhar, a former medical officer with the 6th Dragoon Guards, married into another slave-owning family, the Morisons. His sister, who accompanied him to Victoria, also married a Jamaican plantation owner.
These are the themes — intermarriage among slave-traders and slave-owning families; the imperialist assumption that “crown land” could be bought and sold by settlers; the links to military expeditions; the embrace of racist ideology to justify the exploitation of Indigenous people — that dominate Dan Hicks’s passionately argued new book, Every Monument Will Fall. The museums, statues, place names, ideologies and institutions that memorialise or glorify imperialism and colonisation are the targets of what is both a rallying cry and a prediction.
Hicks would undoubtedly approve of the obliteration of “Moreland.” Names are crucial elements of colonial history, he stresses, because they signify the disparity between the colonisers, who are named, and the colonised, who are not. Although he has much to say about Augustus Pitt Rivers, the founder of the famous Oxford University anthropological museum, he eschews the notion of biography, preferring the term “necrography… a history of loss, of death, of dispossession.” His book is a salvo in the culture wars, a history of colonial museology and an intense scrutiny of the racism and violence that characterised both acquisition and display.
Hicks opens with a highly charged description of a skull-cup — a silver goblet made from the top of a human cranium — that was in regular use at the high table of Oxford’s Worcester College until 2015. This macabre object was bought by Pitt Rivers at an auction in 1884 and donated to the college in 1946 by his grandson, George Pitt Rivers, a fascist and eugenicist. The family name is engraved on the silver rim; the name of the person whose “thoughts, knowledge, understanding, perceptions and memories once pulsed inside this skull” remains unknown. The cup reappears throughout the book, an image and leitmotif that encapsulates the violence of museum “acquisitions” and the dehumanisation of colonised people.
Dan Hicks, a professor of archaeology at Oxford University, is a curator at that very same Pitt Rivers Museum. His disdain for its founder is clear in its early pages, where he summarises Pitt Rivers’s biographical details but pointedly avoids using his name. Instead, he variously calls him the General, the Grandfather, the Collector and Fox, the most consistent of which, Fox, appears designed to reduce his status by depriving him of his double-barrels and his baronetcy.
Pitt Rivers, born Augustus Lane Fox, inherited his peerage from a second cousin, assuming his surname — or, as Hicks insists, his necronym — with the title in 1880. The Pitt Rivers fortune had been amassed and consolidated in the preceding century by intermarriages among landed gentry, mercantile families and aristocrats whose wealth derived not just from their English estates but also from slave trading and slave labour on Caribbean plantations.
Hicks tells us that Pitt Rivers was Britain’s first inspector of ancient monuments and, as an archaeologist, developed excavation techniques that avoided damaging artefacts and facilitated refined analytical processing. During a distinguished military career, he became major-general in the Grenadier Guards, his system of firearms training giving the British technological advantage in the Crimean War.
He also held positions of authority and influence in the Royal Society and other learned societies. He collected a vast number of significant archaeological and anthropological items from all over the world. He founded two eponymous museums — the other was in London — to house his collections. Influenced by the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer, he emphasised the cultural developments and technological change that he believed illustrated the superiority of white people.
As General, Collector and Grandfather, in Hicks’s telling, Pitt Rivers embodies every moral failing of British imperialism. He is presented as a fractured persona, his life and occupations providing the context for Hicks’s insistence on the need to decolonise museums, monuments, university curricula and every vestige of the memorialisation of Britain’s colonial past.
Paradoxically, though, Hicks’s “un-naming” seems to me to let the perpetrators off the hook. He recounts, for example, the horrors of the massacre following the Morant Bay rebellion in Jamaica in 1865, in which several thousand Black Jamaicans were killed. “Let’s not give this chapter of the story his name,” he begins “Call him the future governor if you like.” That governor was Edward John Eyre, the explorer and ethnologist who, early in his career, described aspects of Indigenous life in South Australia. Rendering him anonymous is unintentionally exculpatory: he becomes a mere cipher of British military domination.
While Hicks’s commitment to decolonisation is proclaimed on every page, it remains unclear just what he proposes to do with museums. Toppling statues of colonial heroes is relatively simple; shutting down museums is complicated. On the one hand, there are problems of restitution and reparation; on the other, there is the fact (unacknowledged by Hicks) that not all museums are crammed with “stuff the British stole.”
As I was reading this book the New York Times reported on a deputation to the Pitt Rivers Museum by a group of Naga people negotiating the return of ancestral remains — bones, skin and hair — collected during the nineteenth century. Nagaland is no longer a nation and its people, now mostly Christian thanks to the missionaries who accompanied the British colonial administrators, are spread across several northern Indian states and into Myanmar. Some of them are ambivalent about how to deal with repatriated remains; although they acknowledge that they would be considered sacred, they recognise that appropriate rituals are either forgotten or no longer valued.
The Naga remains were once in a section of the Pitt Rivers Museum labelled “Treatment of Dead Enemies.” As Hicks explains, that theme was of critical concern to the museum’s founder, who believed cultural evolution and technical advancement occurred in the context of violent conflict. According to this view, human evolution is essentially driven by male competitiveness: men’s war-making and conquest accounts for the technological progress essential to imperial projects, from the Roman to the British empires.
Shrunken heads and decorated battle trophies, including scalps with hair, held a peculiar fascination for Pitt Rivers and his contemporaries because they also served as evidence of “primitive barbarity.” They provided the excuse for colonial “pacification” by British troops, who then ransacked and pillaged.
Hicks is outraged that museum holdings still reflect their colonial origins and proposes that this continuity should be recognised as “a movement that normalised dehumanisation” and “mainstreamed debasement.” He believes too that the process of collecting and displaying objects should be named “militarist realism.” This term baffles me, particularly as he draws attention to alternative terms that are in no way similar and perhaps more apposite.
This section of the book is overwritten, full of purple passages and sentences so long their subject is lost. Much of it is written as if he is addressing his colleague, mentor and friend, the late Mary Beaudry, professor of historical archaeology at Boston University. This device works well when he recalls conversations and uses the artifice of memory to elucidate his argument. But often the dialogue is either forced or inconsequential. So, for example, in justifying his terminology he invokes Beaudry: “You could call it Gothic brutalism, you tell me, or magical futurism, White constructivism, or accelerationist materialism; speculative monumentalism perhaps, or nihilist nostalgism. All of these could work, I reply, but how about we name it simply militarist realism?”
Beaudry’s comments almost always reinforce the author’s stance. For instance, Hicks describes at length the formation and activities of “The Cannibal Club,” a dining circle comprising a select group of the men who had formed the Anthropological Society of London. Established to promote polygenist theories, which excluded Africans from the species Homo Sapiens in opposition to Charles Darwin’s monogenism, the society “operated as an exclusive male pseudoscientific debauched space for the comparative discussion of sex, sexuality, sexual organs and related bodily practices, and also, according to some accounts, for sadomasochism and the exchange of colonialist pornography.” Hicks’s description of the prurient sadism of its mainstay, the soldier and explorer Richard Burton, provokes a response from Beaudry: “Sick bastards, you replied. White men in their thirties, mostly, you added, who wore tweed jackets, hand-made shoes and wax in their hair.”
Perhaps Hicks wanted to convey something of the processes of research and writing and how ideas are thrashed out in conversations with colleagues. Or, given her recent death and the fact that the book is dedicated to her, he might have wanted to convey something of his easy intellectual intimacy with Beaudry. But these tangential remarks tend to distract from the flow of his argument.
These sections of the book sit oddly with Hicks’s more academic engagement with writings on racism and the necessity of decolonisation. He offers telling criticisms of some recent trends in anthropology and archaeology, deploring the influence of writers such as Arjun Appadurai and Bruno Latour, whose theoretical notions of the “agency of objects” blur distinctions between subjects and objects. He sees this move as a resurrection of colonial-era constructs that objectified other human beings and erased human responsibility for the enslavement and deaths of thousands of people.
From the outset, Hicks attacks those who advocate a more nuanced decolonisation of monuments — new plaques with historical contextualisation, for example — than their destruction. He was among those who called for the removal of the statue of Cecil Rhodes at Oxford’s Oriel College and attributes the failure of the “Rhodes Must Fall” campaign to “a combination of denial, anxiety, obviation, paralysis, weakness, whataboutism, wherewillitendism, excuses, bullying, threats, lies, and above all meek deference to unseen and possibly nonexistent authorities.”
He is right to see Pitt Rivers and Rhodes as deplorably racist individuals, and I wouldn’t oppose the removal of their statues. But I think he overestimates the significance of these grandiose monuments. Drawing attention to these men as exemplars of colonial values can also be a way of reminding people of past wrongs. New explanatory plaques and documentation, or juxtapositions of contemporary art works with these monuments, can give the lie to their heroism. History can be reimagined and told by other, hitherto suppressed, voices.
Hicks suggests that a gap, a fallen statue, can be instructional, and describes the effect of observing the place where a statue of Louis Agassiz once stood on the campus of Stanford University. But he fails to recognise that this gap has meaning only for those who come to it knowing that the statue was removed in 2020 because of Agassiz’s ideas about racial polygenism. For those who know nothing about Agassiz, no meaning can attach to a gap.
Toppling statues can be symbolically powerful, of course. Images of the felling of monuments to Stalin or Saddam Hussein were dramatic testament to the fates of their cruel and repressive regimes. But they are moments, and meaningful only if the histories of their regimes are known. The point of decolonisation is to intervene and expose the myths of colonialism, replacing them with truths about the experiences of the colonised and their survival.
Certainly the repatriation of human remains and objects valued by the descendants of colonised people is a start. But far more instructive are moves to enable Indigenous or colonised people to curate exhibitions and retell the stories of colonisation.
Yiwarra Kuju: The Canning Stock Route, an exhibition that toured Australia in 2010, documented of the effect of pastoralism on Australia’s Indigenous people and their country through artefacts and artworks. Pacific artists including Yuki Kihara, whose exhibition Paradise Camp was shown at the Venice Biennale in 2022, and Lisa Reihana, whose He Tautoko presentation in 2006 provided a contemporary Māori response to items in the collection at the Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, have produced biting critiques of colonial representations of Samoan, Tahitian and Māori culture.
The current exhibition at the University of Melbourne’s Potter Museum, 65000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art, includes a gallery on “Scientific Racism” that exposes the racist eugenics that motivated collections of skeletal remains of Indigenous Australians. It also refutes the claim that such collections are important research repositories: no research was ever undertaken on the Indigenous skeletal remains held by the university.
At the end of Every Monument Will Fall, Dan Hicks backtracks a little, suggesting that “all monuments will fall” of their own account, as people render them irrelevant, or insist on changes to the form and functions of museums. He suggests that museums will change simply because “it’s impossible to hold onto everything” and people will “reimagine ideas of tradition, benefaction and heritage, dismantle structures that have no place in our times, find new ways of inheriting and remembering.”
This process, which he sees as a “culture war,” is perhaps more advanced in former colonies in the Pacific region than in Britain, where the legacies of colonialism are different and triumphalist fantasies of an imperial past continue to have some purchase. Certainly here in Merri-Bek the controversary over the new name died down quickly. It is now generally perceived as a gesture of reconciliation and an acknowledgement of Indigenous heritage.
Every Monument Will Fall: A Story of Remembering and Forgetting By Dan Hicks | Hutchinson Heinemann | $36.99 | pages
