The bloom has attracted up to 20,000 admirers who filed past, hoping to experience the smell for themselves, with some attendees describing it as "like death," "like poop," and "like sewage water."

Australia Day is known to some Indigenous Australians as Invasion Day, symbolising a key moment in the destruction of their cultures by European settlers.

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,