I leapt sideways, my already elevated heart rate spiking into the red zone before I realised my foolishness.

The assailant was in fact a new sculpture of R. G. Menzies, Australia's longest-serving prime minister and champion of the very lake on whose edge he now stands.

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Higher on the other shore, the dual figures of wartime prime ministers John Curtin and his then treasurer, Ben Chifley, are depicted deep in conversation during their regular evening walks through the parliamentary triangle.

This week, it was announced that another former prime minister will get a place in the stately climes of the parliamentary precinct, the Country Party leader John "Black Jack" McEwen.

Now, a debate about his recognition is an entirely reasonable exercise.

After all, the committed protectionist helmed the show for under a month upon Harold Holt's shock disappearance.

But beyond the case for memorialising proper national leaders, a deeper question arises.

Why, even though we think we've moved on from the White Australia Policy and flagrant institutionalised sexism, is the bar of contemporary recognition set so low for one powerful class - all of them Anglo-Celtic males - and yet so high for those who reshaped Australia from the more disadvantaged margins?

Where are the lakeside statues of the real nation-builders, the selfless change-agents of the Australian story, the Indigenous leaders, the women who demanded the vote, the social and environmental campaigners central to modern Australia - as distinct from those who resisted them at the time?

When the McEwen statue was reported on Wednesday, I posed the question on Twitter: "why not statues of Truganini, Vincent Lingiari, Faith Bandler, Eddie Mabo et al?

There was a strong response, with other worthy suggestions coming forward. Names like Dorothy Tangney, who was the first woman to be elected to the Australian Senate in 1943, and Enid Lyons, who became the House of Representatives' first woman MP in that same election.

Or the former Queensland senator, Neville Bonner, the first Indigenous person elected to the Australian Parliament.

These are clear parliamentary ground-breakers. But we can think more widely - if only because if we do not, we inadvertently replicate the discriminatory exclusions of the past.

By definition, the history of a nation built on racial and gendered prejudices will mark those who were the winners of their day.

If we have improved from then to now but still celebrate only those "legged-up" according to the old rules, are we not echoing the same discriminations down through history?

To put it another way, historical inquiry which confines itself to this superficial frame merely replays the rigged game of the past, replete with its denial of access, and the continued anonymising of those shut out.

Consider this: Scott Morrison is Australia's 30th prime minister. If all were given statues around the triangle, there would still be just one woman.

When the Black Lives Matter protests took flight earlier this year, statues of slave owners, misogynists, paedophiles, and rapacious industrialists became the subject of attacks and removal.

Some were defaced while others were de-plinthed, causing panic among conservatives and restoking simmering arguments,dubbed the "history wars".

In one well-argued piece, historian and journalist Dr Julia Baird celebrated the defrocking of some of history's cruellest people - King Leopold II and 18th-century slave trader Robert Milligan among them.

"One of the more perplexing arguments made in recent days is that toppling, relocating or removing old statues amounts to the erasure of history. It is in fact the very opposite: it is history ... we don't get to choose whether or not this happened; but we do get to choose whether or not we deny it," she wrote.

Journalist and public intellectual Stan Grant has also mounted a compelling case for the reinterpretation of figures from Captain James Cook down.

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While we like to think we are more enlightened now, the refusal to square up to our nation's past represents a kind of infantilism. But worse, it operates as a contemporary insult, an ex post facto validation of criteria from which we claim enlightened separation.

Invisible though it is, the underrepresentation of women and Indigenous Australians is its own monument.

Yet do we see it? As recently as 2013, we accepted a 19-member cabinet with just one woman.

Compare the low bar for rewarding a 23-day caretaker against the epochal High Court battle waged by Eddie Mabo, or the relentless campaigning for Indigenous rights, and indeed women's rights, by Faith Bandler.

Even now, the Parliament is in practice an exclusive institution, more notable for the few it lets in and the progress it holds back.

The parliamentary triangle isn't about Parliament itself. That's just the mechanism. It's about what it represents: nation, democracy, participation and justice.

Viewing our history honestly against the wrongs we've forsaken will allow us to more clearly define the nation we strive to become.