Yet somehow, our attention has been shifted from black lives to statues of very dead white people, discounting Tony Abbott and John Howard.

A conversation about what monuments we keep or contextualise somehow is always welcome, as long as it's intelligent. Sadly, however, intelligence has left the building when it comes to the actions of some protesters.

Take the vandalism of Captain Cook's statue in Sydney. Cook was a brilliant navigator who planted the Union Jack in many places he probably shouldn't have. His arrival on these shores was a harbinger of 250 years of misery for Aboriginal Australians.

But not far from his monument is a statue of Queen Victoria, who took the British Empire to its zenith, institutionalising racism and exploitation in a red stain all over the world. Yet her statue remains untouched.

It seems the eagerness to jump on the statue bandwagon of protest action that's probably justified in the US, which fought a civil war over slavery, has pushed the Black Lives Matter movement out of focus.

So, too, the knee-jerk reactions of TV streaming services in dropping long-dormant episodes of TV series and even films because they might be deemed offensive. Even our own ABC has jumped on this bandwagon with its sinister sounding Harm and Offence audit. It has echoes of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, in which history itself was rewritten at the point of a gun. Meanwhile, as the culture warriors are shouting about this, another black man is gunned down needlessly in the American South.

The broad community needs to hear the stories of Aboriginal Australians; it needs to understand what white privilege is. We should hear from Indigenous academics like Marlene Longbottom, who explains why she finds the highway monument to Alexander Berry so offensive.

We're more likely to listen, indeed to hear, if we're not distracted by an act of vandalism that only serves to polarise the community at a time when it needs to be brought together. In the end, black lives matter a whole lot more than statues.