Coming soon - a statue-festooned suburbia

Quite well-travelled and always public art alert wherever I go, I find myself wondering if what the reporter says can possibly be true.

Imagining that she is thinking of figurative statues (statues of human figures) it is my contrary impression that Canberra is relatively statue-impoverished.

Some cities that I know seem quite statue-festooned by comparison with Canberra, surely in part because when a city is very, very old it accumulates statues in the way that the human face accumulates wrinkles and gnarls.

In that sense our federal capital city, its first sods turned scarcely more than 100 years ago, is still baby-faced.

Then, in a perfect world, in a perfect city, what would be the proper ratio of statues to folk?

For me the equation is complicated by the ways in which a substantial single statue in a conspicuous place seems somehow to better satisfy citizens' statue-hunger than a dozen fiddly little works on spindly little plinths.

One of my world favourites (I ogled it every day for a week, always thinking what a fine role model of bulk, flair, presence and oomph in statuary it was for my own city) is the colossal statue of Scottish hero William Wallace in Aberdeen.

As well as the whole monument being 12 metres tall (the figure of Wallace is 5 metres tall in its own right) it is also, to quote breathless news reports of its 1888 unveiling, "erected on a commanding position, and appears from all points of view in bold relief against the sky ... [and] represents the hero standing facing the south in a boldly erect, vigorous, and lifelike attitude".

My point is, as the installation of Canberra's latest statue gives us all an opportunity to think and tattle about Canberra's public art, that with figurative statues we get the biggest bang for our bucks if the statues are plonked in "commanding" positions and the sculpted figures are made to look "boldly erect, vigorous and lifelike".

Alas, my initial enthusiasm for the new statue of Andrew Inglis Clark in Canberra's CBD is a little tempered now by my realisation that it is not at all in a very commanding position (in the lee of a big building, it will be quite easy not to notice).

But on the plus side the weathered steel Clark himself does look quite "boldly erect, vigorous and lifelike" as if he is hurrying on foot to Lake Burley Griffin to catch the 1.30pm seaplane to Sydney.

Meanwhile, Andrew Inglis Clark barely installed, there are already news reports of allegations that Clark the man (1848-1907) is not statue-worthy because he held and expressed some ideas we today find racist.

Oh dear.

This columnist endorses a point of view just expressed for The Monthly by Anna Goldsworthy.

There, discussing the modern phenomenon of the righteously indignant toppling of statues, she writes: "Many statues have fallen this year; many should have".

"But there are others I should like to keep, and yet more I should like to see erected.

"We are not so rich in art to deplore what we have merely because it is not what we might have had.

"Might this be how a civilisation comes of age?

"Maturity is largely about forgiveness of one's parents.

"They were not perfect, after all, but does this mean we must reject the inheritance entirely, or can we find a way to augment it?"

Although, as just grumbled above, Canberra probably doesn't have an unusual ratio of statues to citizens.

We do have an unusual ratio of commemorated people of the past, commemorated in street names and place names, to suburban citizens of today.

My own Woden suburb (as if anticipating that I, crazy about literature, would move to and live in it one day) is festooned with streets named after Australian novelists and poets.

My own long and winding street is named after a battling and modestly-talented poet.

Poetry-mad, I know his work well.

In a sense, the naming of a street after a poet erects a kind of memorial to him or her.

But what if the naming and planning of ACT writer-named places came with the corollary that the place always be decorated and blessed with a memorial to him or her?

I suspect I may be the only soul in my street who knows who our street is named after.

This seems a shame.

I imagine a figurative statue of him (not necessarily five wheelie-bins tall like the newsworthy new statue of Clark just erected in Civic, but big enough to suburbanly stick out and have people asking "who is that?") decorating my street.

I further imagine (for it seems a tragedy not know or care about such things, to be so historically and culturally pig-ignorant) a similar effigy also decorate and enhance every Canberra residential place named after a commemorated accomplished Australian.

To set a civic example and putting my own street-facing front garden where my mouth is, I have offered the relevant authorities in Canberra my own yard (at the time of writing brandishing sunflowers the height of tall figurative statues, and rustling with Blue-tongued lizards) as the place to install a giant statue of my street's literary great.