LAST week’s rather silly brouhaha over whether a statue of Captain Cook should be removed from a Sydney park, on the grounds he did not ‘discover’ Australia (Echo, Aug 25), reminds me of a teenage friend of mine whose nine-year-old sister loudly protested in a primary school geography lesson that Columbus could not really have discovered America “as the Red Indians were already there”.

Her reward, I recall being told, was a blackboard duster being thrown at her by the teacher.

Cook, as a great son of Cleveland, does deserve a statue, not for a ‘discovery,’ but for his lasting contributions to cartography, hydrology and astronomy, all made in the course of his long career.

David Walsh, Skelton