Monuments and commemorations: a consideration

Abstract

When William Charles Wentworth, the leading conservative politician in the colony of New South Wales, retired from public life in order to travel to Britain in 1853, he informed his devoted followers that he would ‘accept no testimonial except in the form of a colossal statue of his person to be placed in some very conspicuous part of Sydney’. According to the report in a hostile newspaper, Wentworth issued this demand so that ‘his countrymen might have an opportunity of perceiving how a grateful community could appreciate, reward and honour the services of any individual who devoted sincerely his talents and his leisure to the services of his fellow citizens’.1