Our Public Statues

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 793, 14 October 1929, Page 8

Our Public Statues

ARE THEY A SORRY COMPANY? I HAVE been making a detailed inspection of our public statuary, and any demons of worldly ambition that may lxave possessed me in former days have been completely exorcised. These men and women we see commemorated in stone, bronze and plaster-of-Paris were the heroes and saviours of the race. If the statutes that have been erected to them are what devotion and sacrifice lead to, then let me eschew fame,.

The tides of human affairs have, in their ehb and flow, deposited a wide selection of memorials on these shores. In ease any readers are not properly acquainted, with the statuary of this city (and some there are who go about with their eyes cast down, blind to the beauty that lies about them), let me review briefly some of the choicer objects of virtu that are to he found in our public places. No article of this sort would be complete, as the saying goes, without a reference to the impressive bronze of the late Queen which stands in Albert Park. I have a great respect for the Victorian age: a period which managed to produce Tennyson, Lord George Sanger and the Tichborne Claimant is worthy of the respect of any man. And I feel that some more appropriate way than this might have been found to celebrate one of the great periods of British history. The only thing I can say in its favour is that the Queen would probably have liked it. Then there is the Grey statue. The authorities, in my opinion, showed a nice sense of values, of the fitness of things, in moving this fulldress representation of Sir George (who was his tailor, by the way?) from the bustling mart to its present situation, close to Queen Victoria. There is a concordance, a certain aesthetic harmony, between the trousers of Sir George and the robes of the Queen. They both have that rather prim voluptuousness, that air of easy prosperity, which characterised the age in which they lived.

In the vestibule of the Public Library we have a bust of Nelson and another of the Duke of Wellington. The sculptor who scraped out the features of the admiral must have had, I feel sure, just half as many eyes as his subject. At any rate, I cannot believe that the villainouslooking corsair represented here was the victor of Trafalgar, the man who corresponded regularly with Lady Hamilton. The features of Wellington are rather nobler, hut the art is just as bad. I gazed at this for a long time, and could not find it in my heart to blame Blucher for not turning up on time. If he had arrived earlier he might have been let in for this sort of thing, too. There is a statue of Lord Kitchener at Oratia, near Glen Eden, which I must not omit to mention, a most dreadful piece of work. It must have

given many a passing motorist a severe sbock. Not even Remarqxie himself could coffer us sucb a convincing argument against war as this provides. If we must have wars in the future, for Heaven’s sake let them be, if not bloodless, at least statueless wars. Bad as tbe Kitchener monument is, there is yet a worse one. I allude to the effigy of Nurse Cavell at the Auckland Public Hospital, which looks like a parody on an early work of Epstein’s. Nurse Cavell, I believe, Is reported as having said that “patriotism is not enough.” An inspection of this figure almost convinces one that it is too much. If this is the consequence of being patriotic, then the sooner I am hanged for high treason the better I shall be pleased. When, in the ordinary course of events, a perfectly good block of stone is hacked about with a chisel and propped up to commemorate some hero of the past, the sight of it can be borne, even by the more sensitive, with the exercise of a little fortitude. It may even help to relieve the drabness of things by providing comic relief to the general tragedy of existence on this planet. One can snigger, and pass by with a tranquil mind; but there is something about this figure of Nurse Cavell that strikes at the very foundations of civilised life. It moves me to a sort of cold rage—the rage that primitive men might have felt on coining home and finding that his grandmother had been dug up and eaten by the caveman next door. Not even Lucretia Borgia deserved a memorial like this. Indeed, it is high time that a campaign was opened with the object of removing some of the more revolting of our public statues and replacing them with good work. I am not denying that there may be a few iii Auckland that are not altogether hopeless. But most of those I have seen are merely drear disfigurements of a landscape already overburdened with motor-spirit advertisements and injunctions to the public in regard to dogs, waste paper, and the parking of cars. They might justify their existence as ships' ballast, but they are not good for much else. No, on the whole I don’t think I shall allow myself to become famous. , A.R.D.F.