The City of Yarra decided to get rid of the granite monument from Edinburgh Gardens after vandals repeatedly targeted it and cost the council thousands of dollars.
The City of Yarra decided to get rid of the granite monument from Edinburgh Gardens after vandals repeatedly targeted it and cost the council thousands of dollars.
By Lachlan Abbott
May 13, 2025 — 9.55pm
A council has voted to permanently remove a repeatedly vandalised Captain Cook memorial from an inner-northern Melbourne park after catastrophic damage meant it would cost thousands of dollars to repair.
The City of Yarra decided on Tuesday night to get rid of the granite monument, which usually sits at an entrance to Edinburgh Gardens in North Fitzroy. Its bronze plaques might now be given to the Captain Cook Society, which celebrates the British explorer.
A council report said frequent vandal attacks in recent years, particularly around Australia Day, had caused some irreparable harm to the bust of James Cook’s face and meant the council was pouring more and more money into the memorial’s maintenance.
The Age reported last year that council officers recommended the monument be removed from the municipality’s collection due to its poor condition and their view that it had little significance to Edinburgh Gardens.
The monument is currently in council storage after it was toppled and tagged with the words “cook the colony” on January 28 last year. Yarra City Council chief executive Sue Wilkinson said on Tuesday night that the damage from that attack was “catastrophic” and would cost $15,000 to fix.
Councillors voted unanimously at Tuesday’s meeting to support the officer recommendation and de-accession the memorial from the City of Yarra’s collection.
Mayor Stephen Jolly said council had to separate the debate about whether some statues linked to colonialism were appropriate with the “boring economic issue” of the cost of maintaining this monument.
“I’m not in favour of demolishing statues of people in the past, even problematic ones,” he said.
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“But [I] don’t think if we put it back up, it would be just damaged one more time. It would be ongoing, ongoing and ongoing. And how can we justify that?”
Jolly encouraged the Yarra chief executive to consider an offer from the Captain Cook Society’s Bill Lang for that group to take possession of the monument’s plaques and seek another location for their display.
Lang said the Captain Cook Society were having informal discussions with other local governments and museums to find a home for the monument, and would “act as custodians of it in the short term”.
“Rather than it sitting in some council shed somewhere … it should be preserved, and an appropriate place found for it,” Lang said.
He believed helping facilitate the monument’s removal from Edinburgh Gardens was a pragmatic step and did not amount to giving in to the pressure of vandals.
“I don’t think it’s for a council to necessarily pursue things like the memorial, if they can’t afford to do it, given other pressing issues citizens have got in the City of Yarra,” Lang said.
He urged police to enforce the law and protect against similar vandalism of Captain Cook monuments.
“It’s incredibly disappointing that there are people that can’t put themselves in the shoes of people of their time,” he said. “We would all do much better to understand our history and to learn from it.”
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