Resisting the Suppression of Western Colonial Crimes: Interview with Activist Stephen Langford  

On 8 May 2025, New South Wales District Court Judge Christine Mendes quashed the Local Court conviction of Sydney activist Stephen Langford for the offence of intentional or reckless damage or destruction to property, after finding that his act of sticking an A4 piece of paper to a statue using craft glue did not amount to “malicious damage”, which the offence is commonly known as.

But when it comes to the act of defacing the statue with paper, Langford is a habitual offender. He’s twice been caught in the act on CCTV: once in 2020 and again in 2023. And for this act of using water-soluble paste to stick a piece of paper to a monument, he’s been tracked by NSW police officers, arrested, strip searched and then been made to spend the night in the police lockup.

The problem appears to be what Langford actually prints on the A4 paper that he then sticks to the statue of former NSW governor Lachlan Macquarie, who held office from 1810 to 1821, because it conveys a decree issued by him, ordering British subjects to ethnically cleanse the region of its First Peoples, either via their taking as prisoners of war, or if they resist they should be shot and killed.

Macquarie’s genocidal decree also suggests those murdered by European invaders be strung up from trees to warn other Aboriginal people about what could happen to them. This order then led to the April 1816 Appin Massacre, which involved a British regiment killing at least 14 Dharawal and Gandangara people. However, the statue’s plaque describes Macquarie as something of a saint.

A modern-day Lachlan Macquarie

Since October 2023, there has been an unspoken decree operating in the colony of NSW, and right across this continent, which involves an informal prohibition against showing too much support for the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip, even though Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu has ordered Israeli occupiers to kill all Palestinians and clear the land of them.

No overt order has been issued by PM Anthony Albanese nor NSW premier Chris Minns to keep mum about this, but both leaders have made it well known through subtler means that pro-Palestinian words and actions are being increasingly criminalised, and a chief tool in the box to create this fear around opposing a heinous genocide is the deeming of those supporting the Gazans as antisemites.

This trick involves conflating the overt support for the upholding the human rights of Palestinians as actually revealing prejudice towards Jewish people, and it was once opposed openly by Albanese. Yet, since 7 October 2023, the PM quickly learnt which side of the bread his butter was on, while Minns has shown himself to have been ahead of the game in this regard.

But the links between Langford’s crimes and supposed pro-Palestinian “wrongdoing” have not been lost on a mass of the constituency, as attacks on Australian colonial statues have intensified over the course of the Gaza genocide and the heightened form of recent attacks suggests that anyone up on charges of intentional or reckless damage would likely have a much harder time getting them dropped.

Sydney Criminal Lawyers spoke to Stephen Langford (Order of Timor) about why he is so concerned about the state of colonial statutes on Gadigal land in Sydney, the initiative the City of Sydney has launched to review the plaques pertaining to 25 such statutes in its local government area, as well as the role the local mainstream media is playing in silencing the truths of the mass murder in Gaza.

Stephen, last week, on 8 May, you appeared in the Sydney Central District Court facing multiple counts of damaging or destruction of property, which is an offence also known as malicious damage, which is a criminal offence that carries up to two years imprisonment.

The act that your crime involved was your having pasted an A4 piece of paper to the NSW governor Lachlan Macquarie statue in Hyde Park North on 2 March 2023.

The piece of paper had printed on it the content of an 1816 decree issued by the then governor of the colony of NSW.

Your defence team argued that your modest act of protest was protected under the implied right of political communication contained in the Australian Constitution.

NSW District Court Judge Christine Mendes last week denied that your act was protected political communication, but she dropped the charges anyway.

Stephen, can you tell us a bit more about the decision of the judge. Why didn’t sticking up a piece of paper warrant malicious damage? Why wasn’t your action exercising your right to political communication?

Judge Mendes had sympathy for what I did. She said it was to be lauded, but it is still against the law. But she did drop the charges.

This doesn’t advance the implied right to freedom of political communication, however. It didn’t set a new benchmark for it, which is unfortunate.

Nevertheless, the case has been good because of the articles that have been written about it, and because it is getting the wretched city council to do what it said it would do, and that is to review the plaques of the 25 government-funded statues of colonial leaders in this city.

This is the whole point of it. The whole point was not to have the words of Macquarie pasted onto the statue.

These words should be there. It is not my life ambition to go around ensuring that the words on these statues are corrected.

The point is that councils, like the City of Sydney, should be doing this, just as Sydney councillor Yvonne Weldon passed a 2023 resolution that said this would be done.

But 19 months later, and it has still not been done. The resolution was passed more or less around the time of 7 October 2023. It was around that time.

I’d also like to mention the David Rovic’s song The Battle of Lachlan Macquarie that sums up the lies involved in what the statue in Hyde Park says and the true life of Macquarie. The song mentions my crime in its lyrics.

We watched David perform this song in councillor Weldon’s office, and it helped inspire her with her decision to progress the resolution about reforming the statues.

So, councillor Weldon successfully passed a resolution to have the colonial statues, like the Macquarie one you allegedly defaced, reviewed? 

Yes, councillor Weldon, the Wiradjuri councillor. The council said they were going to establish a panel, but they haven’t done anything. The CEO of the council, Monica Barone, hasn’t done anything.

They haven’t done anything after 19 months. Maybe I’ve got it wrong? I’ve written to her. I’ve suggested that all the statues have a notice attached to acknowledge that the plaques are “under review”.

You know, something like, “The information on this statue is under review”. Barone has written back, but she didn’t acknowledge that suggestion.

So, specifically the content of the statue plaques are being reviewed? 

They should have been under review 19 months ago. They should have all been changed by now.

We were trying to argue that what I did should be protected under the implied right of political communication.

Many said it was a wafer-thin argument, but we hoped it would succeed. But unfortunately, it didn’t.

The action did succeed in another way, however, and that was by putting pressure on the council to do what it should do.

The outcome shows just how wafer-thin the implied right of political communication is. Judge Mendes could have strengthened it, as well as dropped the charges.

These rights are what we fight for, they are not handed down on stone tablets. It is what we fight for.

The first time you committed this very same crime was on 18 June 2020. That was at the height of the Black Lives Matter protest movement on Gadigal land in Sydney, which was part of a global uprising sparked by the Minnesota police killing of George Floyd in the US.

At that point in time, many BLM protests were staged in Sydney. Some of these events saw police surrounding colonial statues to protect them, in particular the James Cook statue in Hyde Park.

Your act of protest highlighted the impacts of and destruction wrought by colonisation upon First Nations people of this continent. And it linked the racist actions of the past to the prejudicial crimes of the present both here and in the US.

The first time you were caught committing this act, you did it at night. You posted the paper and rode away on your bike from Hyde Park to College Street in Surry Hills, which is where the NSW police tracked you down to.

And on both occasions for pasting a piece of paper to a block of stone, you were held overnight in the lockup, strip searched and loaded up with bail conditions.

If you had stuck a blank piece of paper to the statue, without the Macquarie decree on it, do you think you would have been tracked down, charged and dragged through the court system for years, as you have been?

That’s an interesting question. You’d have to ask the police. But I would guess no. I would say it is the decree.

Another thing is, if you go down to Appin, which is where the 1816 massacre related to the decree happened, people care a lot about this.

I went there for the anniversary about five years ago, and there were about 500 people there easily. So, this is not just some crazy committing this act, it is something that people really care about.

But it is also something that people don’t read about on these statues. And if you do read what is on them, they are offensive.

Ordinary people do care, but they just haven’t connected it to the statue in Hyde Park. 

My dad had to leave Austria because his last name was Jewish. But now, you don’t go to Austria and see statues of Himmler and Hitler.

But that is what it is like for Aboriginal people: these colonial statues. These are statues of people who have done their best to displace, kill you and get rid of you, and then there are statues of them around Sydney.

Let’s be honest about history for once in our lives. I’m not just doing this for Aboriginal people. I’m doing this for everyone, because we all have to know our own history.

For the act of sticking an A4 piece of paper to a statue, you were the subject of a brief manhunt, you were then strip searched, denied bail and held overnight in the lockup, and you were made to appear at multiple hearings that involved overinflated charges that were never successful.

Because you repeated this rather innocuous act, this whole process went on for five years.

So, having gone through this process twice, do you consider that there are problems involved in the way the criminal justice system is dealing with such matters, or do you consider the system is designed to penalise you in this long drawn-out manner?

It is designed this way. Lilli Barto, the activist, said something good at court. She said, “This is the colonial system.” You know, they’d rather drag me through the courts than do what is right and correct the statues.

You have to remember this governor Macquarie statue in Hyde Park was put there in 2013. This is after Henry Reynolds. This is after John Pilger. This is after many people had already spoken out.

So, the Macquarie statue is only a little over 10 years old? 

Yes, that is when it dates from. This is not something from 1913. It is from 2013.

So, you’re saying they’re still propagating the same colonial myths that we tend to consider they stopped reinforcing some time ago? 

Yes, it is bollocks. How they thought they could do that, I don’t know? Or maybe they just did it and no one noticed.

I didn’t notice it until I saw mention of that exact quote in a Greens newsletter. I thought this should be on the statue, I wonder if it is?

So, I went to the statue, and it was not there. So, I decided there should be some truth on the statue.

If you go to the statue, there is a plague of unreferenced information saying how great he is. Some of it seems to reference the Hobart Mercury of 1821 but it’s unattributed.

I don’t see how something that was so expensive can be of such poor quality.

As noted, back when your major crimes were committed there was an unofficial prohibition on making criticisms of the crimes of the Australian colonial state or raising the injustices that First Peoples have been subject to and continue to be subject to, because of the outpouring of the Black Lives Matter movement.

But at the moment, there has been a 19-month-long prohibition on criticising the establishment of Israel, its taking of the Palestinian Occupied Territory in 1967, its apartheid regime and, of course, the Gaza genocide.

So, do you consider that there is a link to the way in which these unofficial prohibitions have been operating in this state over recent years?

It is all linked. This is just the lengths that they will go to obscure our crimes. Looking at what they are doing now, I wouldn’t have believed that it could happen.

But of course, this is how it works. They will go to any lengths to stop it. It is what the ABC and the BBC are doing. It’s what people like Owen Jones are talking about.

The mainstream media is taking the words of the Israeli Defence Force as something that is legitimate and respectable, even though when they talk, they lie and then they are found to be lying.

Owen Jones was saying over a microphone somewhere in London that if someone says it is raining, and another person says that it is dry, the job of the journalist is not to give way to either one of the parties, as their job is to look out the window and see if it is raining or not.

The job is to establish the truth of the matter, not to just report either side as if they could be true.

What we are seeing at the moment is so strange. We are seeing 2 million people being starved to death and we are doing zero about it.

Penny Wong and Anthony Albanese are crowing about having gotten back into power, in my opinion, neither of the major parties deserve one single vote – not one single vote.

Well, that leads me to my last question, Stephen. And that is that the Australian state may have just dodged a bullet at the election in terms of the demise of Dutton, however the Labor Israeli-genocide apologist government is back in power, and the Netanyahu government has openly declared violent settler colonialism is its stated goal in Gaza.

So, how do you see this shaping up from here?

We have got to fight back. Resist is to win. We have got to resist against our own media. For years East Timor was supposedly inaccessible to journalists, and it was never stated, we just assumed something bad was happening because they couldn’t get in.

When I rang up the ABC and told them that East Timor was under illegal occupation and why didn’t they say that it was, I was told by them that it wasn’t what the two major parties thought, because they thought it was legitimate.

So, they don’t go by international law, they go by the two-party monoculture.

To resist is to win. That’s what the Timorese say.

But in that answer you got from the ABC about not considering East Timor to be occupied because that was not what the two Australian major parties thought, how does that reflect on our current moment? 

What is happening now is exactly the same thing. The media is doing what the two-party system says, and they are completely behind the US and Israel. Israel is basically just a part of the US.

So, by that sort of measure, we have got no chance about getting any true information from the ABC, except for a few maverick journalists who break the rules.

The best thing that I have seen are the protests outside the ABC to show that they are not telling the truth.

A huge amount of why these mistruths are circulating is the mainstream media and its lack of independence.