Things have reached a sorry pass when police have to stand guard in Sydney over statues honouring the likes of Captain James Cook and Governor Lachlan Macquarie.
James Cook was a towering maritime hero and humanitarian without whose timely discovery of Australia's east coast this country might well have become the setting for French, Dutch or Spanish conquest.
History suggests that our indigenous people would not have fared better - maybe a lot worse - under any of those powers.
And Lachlan Macquarie was the man who brought much-needed order and enlightenment to our dysfunctional, rum-ridden colony (only to fall out - to his undoing - with the influential landed elites).
Both men were pivotal to our history, our development, and our understanding of where and who we are today. Neither was without flaws, but these were vastly outweighed by their deeds.
As Shakespeare's Mark Antony said of Julius Caesar, 'The evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones'.
Then there's Winston Churchill, whose monument in London has been a target for mindless vandalism: the British wartime prime minister without whose doggedness and diplomacy America might not have joined the fight against Hitler, and Europe today might be a very different place.
What are the young people being taught in our schools today, one wonders! (Probably best not to know.)
The world has clearly gone mad, and history is being rewritten by the day, all in the name of the Black Lives Matter movement sparked by a man's (undeniably brutal) death at the hands of police in Minneapolis.
Over here the cause has been taken up by protesters keen to draw parallels with the condition and treatment of indigenous Australians, despite the fact that very different histories and issues are involved.
Thousands of placard-waving protesters took to the streets in Sydney two weekends ago, defying the prime minister, the premier, the police and commonsense.
Their actions have made a mockery of the COVID-19 lockdown measures that have caused massive economic and personal hardship over recent months, and putting at risk our enviable recovery path.
The issues being championed by the protesters are real enough, but they'll be no less real once the coronavirus pandemic crisis is over, and that's the time for mass gatherings - not now.
If any good is to come out of the COVID-19 meltdown for Australia, it should be a reassessment of our resources, living standards, trading relationships and national priorities.
Despite the oft-quoted mantra that 'We're all in it together', it's obvious that we're not: it's all about winners and losers, and pressure is building for a levelling of the playing field.
The Australia that emerges from the financial ruins will need to be a leaner, fairer, more focused and self-reliant nation than the laid-back, complacent one that went into it.
