In the Soil that Nurtures Us

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The removal of the monument to slave owner Edward Colston in Bristol during the Black Lives Matter uprising in 2020 did more than denounce the ongoing celebration of colonial legacies. It was a public execution to colonial mythmaking. This paper examines such colonial mythmaking in the context of the settler-colonial nation-state of Australia. By situating Thomas Woolner’s Captain Cook (1879) within the context of settler-colonial nation building to link its protection by police at the height of the 2020 BLMS protests, this paper emphasises the value of colonial monuments to the five-hundred-year history of modern colonisation. Colonial monuments in Australia serve a militarised function to narrate the lie of a just settlement on the grounds of *terra nullius* and deny First Nations sovereignty. Woolner’s sculpture, this paper argues, protects itself from the memory that the nation-state longs to forget.