Captain Cook Statue, Cairns, Queensland

Drove by this one completely by accident. Its made of concrete and stands 10 Meters high … or 32.8 Feet (according to this website) and was created in 1972 to stand next to a backpackers motel that had been there since the 1960’s but was torn down in 2006. It’s a very large statue of Captain Cook, the 18th century British explorer of the ‘uncharted’ oceans who ‘discovered’ Australia.

It was repainted in 2007, and apparently became for sale because the Japanese developers who bought the motel property didn’t want it. In Jan 26, 2017, known as Australia Day/Invation day — the commemoration of the day the first prison boat landed in Sydney, while the statue which was STILL standing in it’s origianl location (I’m going the hazard a guess that it’s STILL for sale, over 10 years later) … it was “vandalized” when some folks hung a sign on it saying “Sorry”… pretty tame and polite to be called vandalization… if you ask me. Apparently at the time, an Indigenous/Aboriginal artist by the name of Munganbana Norman Miller suggested that the statue should be given a proportionally large Boomerang to hold… which would have been cute