From Cecil Rhodes in Cape Town and Oxford, to Confederate general Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, and to James Cook and Arthur Phillip in Sydney, statues commemorating historical figures have been subject to a wave of controversies in recent years. Once acclaimed as national or imperial heroes, such figures are sites for making meaning, their individual lives and actions ascribed larger significance and co-opted into national and imperial stories. In Australia as elsewhere heroes have been part of the construction of ideas about nationhood and identity. At Federation, the new nation’s icons were a small group, mostly men, mostly white, and included among the pantheon of British national and imperial heroes. By its centenary in 2001, the rhetoric of empire was long in the past, and the number of Australian heroes had grown and diversified, including many more women, Indigenous Australians, and non-British migrants. This paper explores how the cast of those held up for admiration in Australia has changed during the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, as Australia itself was transformed in myriad ways. Challenged, fractured, upheld, or defended, narratives of heroes and famous figures continue to be key sites for national myth-making.