There may be a lull in the statue wars now, but that is because the front has broadened – certainly overseas. This oration shows how statues rose with the nineteenth century, and spread with the growth of empires, not least to Australia. The nature of traditional Australian statuary is considered, along with the questions it implicitly raises. (Comparisons are made with America.)  Statues, it seems, have become lightning conductors for unresolved tensions, the public culture which once sustained them being increasingly subject to segmentation and fracture.