Captain Cook monument cut down by protesters ahead of Australia Day

Workers remove the remnants of a Captain Cook statue in Melbourne, after vandals cut the statue off at the ankles (Diego Fedele/AAP/AP)

Two monuments symbolising Australia’s colonial past were damaged by protesters ahead of an increasingly polarising national holiday that marks the anniversary of British settlement.

A statue in Melbourne of British naval officer James Cook, who in 1770 charted Sydney’s coast, was sawn off at the ankles on Thursday, while a monument of Queen Victoria in the city’s Queen Victoria Gardens was doused in red paint.