The statue of a person some call an "explorer" and others call a "colonizer" has been vandalized in Australia. English naval Captain James Cook sailed the world's oceans in the 1700s. Cook's crews were famously brutal to the Indigenous people of the lands where their ship docked.

Australian police are investigating after a statue of Captain James Cook was covered in red paint and disfigured, ahead of the Australia Day weekend. It is the second time in 12 months that the statue in Sydney has been vandalised.

Police in Australia launched an investigation on Friday after a statue of British naval officer James Cook was found vandalized in Sydney. The hand and nose of the statue of Cook, who charted Sydney’s coast in 1770,

A statue of Captain James Cook in Sydney’s eastern suburbs has been splashed with red paint and its hand removed days before Australians celebrate their controversial “Australia Day” on Sunday. New South Wales police said it received reports of a vandalised statue in Sydney’s Eastern Beaches at Randwick on Friday morning and that officers had seized “a number of items” at the scene.

The vandalism unfolded in Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra. Australia Day is a divisive holiday that critics see as a symbol of racism and oppression.

SYDNEY - A statue in Sydney of British explorer James Cook, captain of the first Western ship to reach the east coast of Australia, was sprayed with red paint and damaged two days before Australia’s national day,