Monuments and memorials are often treated as if they are fixed. They are not. They are living records that gather meaning and accumulate attachments. Read this way, public art forms a civic archive. It preserves gestures, policies, and priorities in metal, stone, concrete, and light. It also records silences and exclusions. When cities remove, replace, or neglect these works, they edit the public record. The question is how to manage that record with sensitivity and accountability, while caring for collection assets so they remain legible for future generations.

The public artwork as archive

Public artworks can be read as an archive of layers. The political layer are the agendas and power structures that determine which works are built, which are cared for, which are disposed of. The material layer holds the artist’s idea and the slow inscriptions of weather. The place layer binds the work to its site, where surrounding buildings, landmarks and landscape provides a context. And then there is the social layer that unpredictably and organically gathers memory and creates new meanings. With time, these layers fold together until the artwork becomes a record of how a city imagines, governs, creates, and remembers itself.

This archive is never neutral. Cities can be understood by their monuments and artworks: who is granted visibility and who is not, which narratives receive resources, and which are deferred.

What changes when values change

Public sentiment shifts, and with it the horizon of what is held as acceptable in civic space. Across Europe, Africa, and the Americas, campaigns to remove statues of colonial figures and slave traders have been tied to anti-racist and decolonial movements. The Rhodes Must Fall protests in South Africa and the United Kingdom, and the removal of Confederate monuments in the United States, for example, placed questions of power and oppression at the centre of heritage debates.^1,2

In Australia, this debate has new urgency. On 28 October 2025, the Governor of Western Australia, Chris Dawson delivered a formal apology to Noongar people for the 1834 Pinjarra Massacre, led by Captain James Stirling, then the Governor of Western Australia.³ The apology acknowledged the killings of Binjareb men, women, and children as a massacre and recognised the enduring impacts of this violent event.⁴ The statement prompted renewed public calls to reconsider how Stirling is commemorated across the state.

Noongar Elders are questioning why a mass murderer continues to be honoured through major infrastructure and landmarks including Stirling Highway, the City of Stirling and the Stirling Ranges. Describing the commemoration of Stirling as a continuing symbol of dispossession and cultural loss, their statements echo a broader international conversation about who has authority over public memory.

In Perth, the bronze statue of Stirling, erected for the State’s 150th anniversary in 1979, was quietly removed from Hay Street in 2024. The City of Perth has since confirmed it remains in storage, pending review. Apparently there are no plans to reinstate the statue. The City of Perth has made a judgement about this without any dialogue with their Elder or Cultural advisory groups. 

When a statue disappears, the question follows: does the truth disappear with it? The recent State apology for the Pinjarra Massacre offers the opportunity for a reinterpretation, which could in itself be a powerful act of truth-telling.

Where Australian monuments relate to histories of violence or dispossession involving First Nations peoples, decisions about their future must involve First Nations authority from the outset. The first obligation is to retain and interpret wherever possible, ensuring that removal, if necessary, is transparent, consultative, and publicly reasoned rather than a default reaction.

International frameworks reflect this. UNESCO’s Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage (1972) calls for both conservation and interpretation, acknowledging that meaning changes as societies mature.⁵ In London, reforms to planning and archaeology policy—particularly Policy 7.8 Heritage Assets and Archaeology—embed this balance between conservation interpretation, and adaptation.⁶

This approach maintains the integrity of the civic archive and allows history to remain visible, debated, and understood in its full complexity. Those most affected by what is remembered—or forgotten—must also have the right of reply.

The Ore Obelisk and the Removed Monument

An example of neglect and eroded civic identity is the City of Perth’s unilateral removal and destruction of Paul Ritter’s landmark memorial, The Ore Obelisk (1971). 

Paul Ritter (1925–2010), émigré architect, planner, and artist, was Perth’s first City Planner appointed in 1965. Born in Prague, Ritter arrived in Perth from the United Kingdom in 1964. Ritter introduced experimental ideas that reshaped the city’s approach to urban design and civic identity. A prolific advocate for integrating art, architecture and pedagogy into civic life, his work ranged from experimental concrete forms and playful 'sculp-crete' underpasses in Rockingham (now heritage listed) that transformed the walk to school into an imaginative landscape, to larger architectural visions such as the Crestwood Estate—a model of suburban planning that separated cars and pedestrians, integrating shared parklands and communal facilities.⁷ His contributions to experimental architecture included student projects that led to the 1966 Fourth Australian Architecture Student Association Convention, held in Perth with Buckminster Fuller as a key speaker.⁸ Ritter is also remembered for saving Perth’s foreshore from a six-lane freeway, an act of civic foresight that preserved the city’s connection to the Swan River/ Derbarl Yerrigan and re-centring civic life around public space.⁹

Among Ritter’s most visible legacies was The Ore Obelisk, erected in Stirling Gardens in 1971 to mark Western Australia’s population reaching one million. Constructed from local geological specimens, the fifteen-metre sculpture symbolised both the booming mineral economy and state identity. Over five decades, it became affectionately known to the public as ‘The Kebab’.

 In 2021, the City of Perth dismantled the sculpture, stating that it required 'full replacement or major refurbishment works'. The work was cut into sections and placed in storage, effectively destroying it. Council papers reference options for conservation, yet no conservation report has been made public.¹⁰

Ritter’s plinth with the original inscriptions remained in situ for four years until Boonji Spaceman by Brendan Murphy was installed by the City in 2025. The acquisition of the seven metre, mass produced astronaut figure was a captain’s call by the then Lord Mayor Basil Zempilas.¹¹ It was quipped 'Space Junk' by art critic John McDonald.¹²

The loss of The Ore Obelisk, by a figure whose contribution to the city was profound, albeit contested, represents a rupture in stewardship of one of Perth’s most significant mid-Century monuments. Ritter’s vision of art embedded in civic life remains visible in fragments across Perth, and the dismantling of his most visible work underscores the fragility of that legacy.

The Politics of Exception

The installation of Boonji Spaceman was arguably a political decision that was certainly made outside normal commissioning frameworks. The City had previously claimed it lacked funds for conservation, yet reallocated $1.3 million from its cultural reserves into general surplus and then found resources to import and install the astronaut.¹³ The act bypassed policy, professional advice, and community consultation. A commercial artwork designed for replication across global markets was fast-tracked as a 'world-class attraction'.¹⁴

 More product launch than civic acquisition, the Spaceman is emblematic of peak capitalism and a form of vacuous monumentalism.

These decisions demonstrate how far the shift away from stewardship of local cultural heritage can travel. It shows how policy frameworks—carefully designed to balance artistic merit, cultural sensitivity, and governance integrity—can be suspended on personal priorities of those in office. Without transparent adherence to process, the civic archive becomes vulnerable to redaction or substitution that neither reflects nor respects the city’s cultural memory.

Towards Cultural Accountability

Across Australia, heritage law protects tangible cultural heritage but rarely addresses the civic and cultural responsibilities attached to public art. The Protection of Moveable Cultural Heritage Act (Cth 1986) regulates export but not stewardship. State level, Aboriginal heritage legislation recognises cultural sites but offers little protection for civic works or design legacies.¹⁵ The National Trust of Western Australia’s Significant Public Art and Monuments Register is a small and critical step towards filling this policy gap.¹⁶

Internationally, the most effective heritage systems combine conservation with interpretation, recognising that meaning evolves. The aim is not to freeze memory but to keep it visible and contestable. The deterioration of The Ore Obelisk and similar works should have prompted transparent consultation, technical review, conservation and interpretative consideration—not erasure.

Seen as a mutable civic archive, public art documents collective identity. Custodianship of this archive demands transparency, cultural sensitivity, and public reasoning. Each decision to preserve, adapt, or retire a work adds to the civic record. For cities, acting with informed consideration is best practice and an ethical duty to those whose histories and futures are written in its public spaces.