She told the panel communities across Australia needed to look at their local monuments and ask: “Who is that person and who is more worthy of being there?”It comes after co-hosts Carrie Bickmore, Waleed Aly and Peter Helliar butted heads with Steve Price on Monday night when Price argued that it was wrong to remove statues because it was “erasing” history.The passionate discussion was prompted by Hobart City Council voting to take down a statue of William Crowther, who while a surgeon, decapitated the corpse of Tasmanian Aboriginal man William Lanne, stole his skull and sent it to the Royal College of Surgeons in London in 1869. Crowther went on to become Premier of Tasmania.“The scientific research that was conducted in those days is so upsetting,” Jacobs said on Tuesday.“There is an abundance of culture and an abundance of First Nations people in Lutruwita/Tasmania that is being celebrated now as it should have been then.“There are still the fish traps that are thousands and thousands of years old, you know? When you talk about who is inferior or who is superior, just look at the things that are still standing.“The middens, the evidence of a very sophisticated culture and way of life that was there in those days.“Then you look at a statue from the 1800s that was of a man who was premier for one year. And he pretty much built it himself, no one else was going to build it for William Crowther.”Her co-hosts Aly, Helliar and Jessie Stephens nodded in agreement. Bickmore and Price were not on the show.Hobart City Council voted 7-4 to take down Crowther’s 8ft bronze statue this week.He was premier from December 1878 until October the following year.He died in 1885 and the statue was erected in 1889.The removal of the statue will make Tasmania the first state to remove a monument to a former premier.“With our decision, we’re saying we’re ready to have truth-telling take prime position in our premier civic square,” Lord Mayor Anna Reynolds said.“We’re also saying that we don’t want to celebrate a time in our history when scientists and doctors wanted to prove theories of European superiority.”Indigenous health professor Chelsea Watego also appeared on The Project on Tuesday.She said Crowther was making the case that Indigenous people were intellectually inferior and not human.“Scientific racism has a long history in this country and has been an essential part of the colonial project to intellectually rationalise the dispossession of Indigenous peoples,” Prof Watego said.“The medical professional has been part of the colonial violence that has been visited upon Indigenous peoples.“So I think if you look at the history of the health sciences in this country, there are so many stories to be told about the violence of health and medical sciences in this country.”
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