The statue gap is about $100m in Melbourne alone, to get statues of women to equal those of men, says Kerry Wilson, cofounder and GEN VIC project lead of the Put Her Name On It campaign.
“It’s not just about naming streets, it’s also about commemorations like public art like statues, murals, plaques,“ she said.
Ms Wilson said through the Baw Baw Shire public art fund and a Victorian Women in Public Art grant, a statues of three Aboriginal matriarchs of Kurnai land, Euphemia Mullet Tonkin, Dorothy Hood and Regina Rose will be erected this year in Drouin.
“The statue is stunning and the stories of these women are just amazing,“ Ms Wilson said.
LGBTIQ+ women, non-binary people and Indigenous women
“We don’t want white women to become the new white men,“ Ms Wilson said.
“It’s even harder to get their stories out there.“
According to not-for-profit organisation Monument Australia, there are no statues of anyone within Cardinia Shire.
The City of Casey also has three statues of historical people: Greek Olympic marathon runner Spyridon Louis, Lord Casey in which the municipality is named after, and Australia’s first Olympian Edwin Flack, who lived in Berwick.
In 2013, there was major backlash to the erection of the Spyridon Louis statue on High St in Berwick due to the lack of any apparent local connection.
Councillor Mick Moreland who moved the motion to have the statue erected next to the Edwin Flack statue stated the two Olympians had been friends.
“There is no evidence they met and they certainly were not good friends,” Peter Sweeney, author of “Edwin Flack”, said in 2013.
The Greek Olympian won the 1896 Olympic marathon, in which Berwick icon Edwin Flack withdrew.
