The Canberra Times has published articles and letters debating the move, and, on Sunday, an op-ed by ANU historian Professor Frank Bongiorno, who approves of the renaming.

I admire and respect Frank, but I have to disagree with him on this issue, as do, it seems, three-quarters of The Canberra Times's Readers Panel of April 13. The argument in favour of removing the name Sirius is superficially plausible. The First Fleet of 1788 brought British settlement to Australia, an event inaugurating the destruction of traditional Indigenous society, a process which continues.

HMS Sirius was the flagship of that fleet and as a symbol of that catastrophic event it does not deserve to be recognised by the naming of such a prominent Commonwealth building.

Except that, inevitably, it's more complicated than that. Let's discount the more extreme ends of the argument against. Correspondents to The Canberra Times have pointed out that European settlement also gave First Nations the benefits of Western democracy, education, health and justice. How's that worked out?

That those benefits were imposed at the cost of the ruin of their lives and without their consent is an awkward fact. Indigenous Australians are still disadvantaged in education, health and justice, rendering that argument spurious.

Let's not even countenance the argument that if Australia was going to be colonised, it was better colonised by Britain rather than, say, France. Since almost the entire global south was colonised by one or another European power, and that the consequences for colonised peoples were invariably disastrous, speculation on the dubious advantage of British settlement seems at best irrelevant.

Let's accept that for First Nations peoples, European settlement was catastrophic.

But does that mean that even symbolic and, it has to be said, abstract connections like the naming of a building after a ship should be excised? Eliminating colonial names, the argument goes, counters the malign effects of settlement.

Certainly, restoring Indigenous names to natural features (often unknown to settlers) is a justifiable way to emphasise that the continent's human history did not begin in 1788.

But eliminating all reminders of colonial settlement would have an unwelcome and perhaps unforeseen effect, of concealing the reality of colonisation.

It's now common to call for the removal of statues of colonial heroes, with attacks on a statue of James Cook in Melbourne the latest round in a culture war of memory. Changing the name of the Sirius Building is another skirmish in that war.

Frank Bongiorno invokes the SA sociologist Brad West's idea of "dialogic memorialisation", regarding such conflicts as opportunities for explanation and debate. Avoiding the ugly Americanism, I would suggest instead a different notion, "reflective commemoration".

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The key difference between the two ideas is that Frank would be happy to lose the name and explain what it had meant, while I'd keep the name and explain what colonialism meant, and means.

Keeping the name and adding a panel explaining what the fleet's arrival meant, reflecting on its consequences seems to be better plan than installing a plaque saying: "This building used to be called Sirius".

Frank and I would both seek to turn the name into a teaching moment, but I think it's surely easier to use as a teaching aid something that is, rather than something which is no longer.

Keeping the name Sirius with a panel explaining why the First Fleet's arrival was so portentous would be more effective. Effacing the name - pretending that the First Fleet had not arrived, or if it had it wasn't important - would be to actually impede the understanding of colonialism and its consequences.

Australia's continuing colonial legacy needs to be faced and acknowledged, explained and understood as a part of our history. Renaming Sirius will not help us to face our history honestly.