Captain Cook statue vandalised again before controversial ‘Australia Day’

Before Australians celebrate their contentious “Australia Day” on Sunday, a statue of Captain James Cook has been splashed with red paint and its hand removed in Sydney’s eastern suburbs.

On Friday morning, New South Wales police reported a vandalized statue in Sydney’s Eastern Beaches at Randwick and said officers had seized “a number of items” from the location.

Following a similar incident in February of last year, restoration work has recently been done to the statute.

In Sydney Cove, Cook and his crew made their way to Botany Bay, opening up the continent now known as Australia for colonization by the British Crown, in 1770.

Nine years later, an Indigenous person attempted to kidnap a Hawaiian chief, but he was killed.

He is frequently associated with Australia Day, which is observed on January 26 to honor the First Fleet’s arrival in Australia in 1788.

Indigenous organizations and their supporters in Australian cities frequently protest the public holiday, which commemorates the start of violent European colonization of the continent.

Indigenous people and their supporters argue that it marks a moment of grief, loss and shame for the descendants of European colonists, or alternatively, the survival of First Nations peoples.

More than 500 distinct Indigenous groups with multiple languages who lived on the continent for 60, 000 years, if not longer, were present in Australia prior to the arrival of the Europeans.