From the Big Prawn to the Giant Pineapple, Australia is lovingly known for the roadside caricatures that dot small country towns and seaside villages alike across our vast continent. Today marked the final chapter of one of Australia’s more obscure roadside attractions — a giant statue of Captain Cook performing a Sieg Heil above a topless bar in Cairns, Queensland. The ten-metre high concrete statue has been a controversial fixture in the far north town for over fifty years, with locals and historians at odds to explain the gesture affixed to Australia’s most notorious seafarer. According to The Guardian in recent years, the statue had been used to advertise a topless bar on Sheridan street. Despite growing community pressure to remove the controversial statue — including a petition to the Cairns council created by Indigenous woman Emma Hollingsworth back in 2020 which received almost 20,000 signatures — the statue has remained firmly fixed in place. The final deciding factor in the removal of the statue was pretty anticlimactic, occurring only after the land was sold out from underneath it. James Cook University — which owned the block the statue was situated on– brought the statue’s history to an end by expanding its campus via the construction of a local hospital.
via junkee: The Saga Of Cairns’ Nazi Captain Cook Statue Is Finally Over