When even the deadenders at the Australian War Memorial (AWM) acknowledge the need to recognise the conflict between white settlers and the country’s First Peoples at our primary national military commemorative site, you can be sure the remaining resisters are deep in denial.
And when it comes to denial, few do it better than Barnaby Joyce, the dumped Nationals leader now enduring the obscurity of being opposition veterans’ affairs spokesman.
Yesterday Joyce announced that shadow cabinet had decided that the wars of invasion and colonisation had no place in the War Memorial. “The fundamental element is that the War Memorial was built in sacred recognition of wars that Australians fought as a nation, unified against an external foe. It is not to be a memorial for conflicts within Australia,” Joyce said.
The Coalition was presumably motivated by the sight of its erstwhile leader, Brendan Nelson, revealing on 7.30 that the AWM had been dragged, kicking and screaming, from the position it held when Nelson was director to a new position, under Nelson as chair, that “will have a much broader, much deeper depiction and presentation of the violence committed against Aboriginal people, initially by British, then by pastoralists, then by police and by Aboriginal militia”.
Joyce’s statement, however, isn’t focused on the central issue of whether the AWM should recognise Australia’s first and worst conflict, in which invaders butchered and dispossessed First Peoples. Instead, for Joyce, it’s all about “placing the Australian War Memorial amidst partisan debate”.
Yes — according to Joyce and his Coalition colleagues, this is all about the politicisation of the War Memorial. These are the people who, in government, appointed to the AWM council:
- Brendan Nelson, former Liberal leader
- Tony Abbott, former Liberal leader
- Glenn Keys, founder of Liberal donor Aspen Medical
- Josephine Stone, life member of the Country Liberal Party
But that’s just run of the mill Joycean stupidity. Examine the Coalition’s formal view on the subject, however, and things get worse. “Conflicts within Australia that pitted Australians against other Australians in our own land, in some instances internecine, should be represented and discussed in a memorial that takes into account this significant difference, and not at the Australian War Memorial,” Joyce claims.
It may come as a shock to Indigenous people, and indeed the rest of us, to discover that the Coalition believes the occupation and seizure of Australia from its First Peoples was a case of a conflict that pitted “Australian against Australian”. If we’re talking in blunt terms, only one side was “Australian” in the wars of dispossession and occupation, and it wasn’t white people. They were from Britain and Ireland. Indeed, the Coalition still clings to the idea that we’re a British offshoot, ruled by a king from an island off the coast of Europe.
Recasting the white invaders and colonisers as “Australian” not only defies history, it defies how those invaders and colonisers saw themselves and described themselves, and defies how many white Australians saw themselves up to the late twentieth century.
The Coalition believes “conflicts involving First Nations’ people are best remembered at Ngurra, the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Cultural Precinct, for which design work is already underway”, Joyce blithely assures us, to the extent Barnaby can do blithe. The word Joyce was really looking for in that sentence is “forgotten”, rather than “remembered” — downgrade the invasion, genocide and dispossession of First Peoples to a non-existent museum far enough away from the AWM to prevent any taint.
The RSL, which is represented on the AWM council by its president, Greg Melick, agrees that reference to the colonisation wars should be banned from the AWM. For Melick, any mention of those wars should purely be in service of the greater glory of service in white armies: “while some frontier conflicts have been featured in Australian War Memorial galleries and touring exhibitions, these have been mounted to provide some context to the subsequent service of First Nations personnel in the ADF.”
You can understand the Coalition’s dismay over the AWM finally acknowledging the first wars of modern Australia. Its project in government, via a stacked AWM council and half a billion dollars in funding, was the transformation of one of Australia’s sacred, unifying spaces into a military amusement park, sponsored by weapons companies, celebrating white Australia’s long participation in wars of imperialism, including our disastrous 21st century imperialist ventures into Afghanistan and Iraq. Needless to say, our hideous record of war crimes and atrocities in Afghanistan is carefully ignored.
It is this attempt by the Coalition to own the War Memorial as a military theme park that is divisive, not the recognition of Australia’s true history of bloodshed and dispossession. It is only the recognition of our history of colonisation, and the resistance by our First Peoples, and the continuing legacy of both, that can restore the War Memorial’s role as a unifying national place of commemoration.
Instead, the Coalition — which will presumably seek to ban mention of frontier wars from the memorial if it is returned to government — wants to continue to use our military history as a tool of politics and division.
the AWM needs to be fully funded by taxes – no “sponsorships” or “patronage” from corporations, particularly war profiteers – the AWM should be a place of learning and reflection … not a recruiting tool, and certainly not a theme park
+1,000
I recently accompanied my primary school students to the AWM. I had a number of young Aboriginal girls and boys with me. I asked them how they liked it; most shrugged or didn’t answer. It was clear they felt no connection to the place. I was struck by how increasingly ‘Theme Park’ it was in style and tone. I have been going every second year for the last decade or so and it gets worse each time. Most frequently asked questions by the students – “Do any of these guns still work?”, closely followed by “Who’s that?”, as they looked with confusion at the ubiquitous images of The Queen.
It’s a beautiful building and could very easily be a place of learning and reflection. But it aint.
It’s a beautiful building and could very easily be a place of learning and reflection. But it aint.
Yes it was a beautiful building and a place of learning. But successive Lib-led governments have sure put paid to the original intention for the AWM to be a place of reflection on the horrors of all war – any time, any where, between any peoples.
The rot did seem to start with Abbott – I think that man had no understanding of what it is to be Australian.
…Abbott – I think that man had no understanding of what it is to be Australian.
That’s because there is “reasonable doubt” he is not.
During his term as an infantry chaplain in the New Guinea campaigns in WWII my father could always count on a young Aboriginal man (18 years old) to volunteer for the burial parties. But on his return, the lad could not vote, could not drink in a pub or even more appallingly he could not join the RSL!
The racism within the RSL is sadly alive and strong.
Sorry, how does the RSL fit into this?
The RSL agrees “that reference to the colonisation wars should be banned from the AWM”. See the link in the article.
Thanks Bernard. It’s a bit difficult to work out what’s going on. It will be important to get hold of the actual Minutes of the Council decision that Dr Nelson claims to have been made. *(Underway.) Whatever eventuates it will be important that what the Memorial does is more than putting all its Frontier Wars artwork and artefacts into one room and calling it the Frontier Wars Gallery. Needs to be commemoration as well, and that means thinking about space on the Roll of Honour, carving the words ‘Australian Frontier Wars’ on the walls alongside other theatres like Gallipoli, the Somme and New Guinea, and – here’s the big one – having a Tomb of the Unknown First Nations Warrior next to or close by the Tomb of the Unknown Australian Soldier. A lot of battles to come, I reckon. But there is a common thread: Defending Country, whether it is Arrernte, Noongar, Wurundjeri or other First Nations Country or Defending Australia as a whole, as in World War II. Indeed, a lot stronger case can be made that First Nations folks were Defending Country than that Australian expeditionary forces brown-nosing the US on the other side of the world were in any real sense Defending Australia.
As a veteran I visited the Canberra war memorial in the 1970s and thought it appropriate and informative. Since then hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent there, money which would have been more useful to, say, the families of veterans: ex-wives in particular, who have done plenty of suffering I can assure you.
In the last 50 years I have learnt a little about Aboriginal nations and their way of life, and then about the war of extinction waged against them by the newcomers with horses and guns and, inadvertantly, disease. There is a strong case to be made that this war still continues while white police can shoot and kill black people and be exonerated by the courts.
I haven’t seen the latest version of the Australian War Memorial, nor do I wish to. But if 50% of it was cleared out and the contents replaced by first nations’ representatives with what they think appropriate I would travel the several thousand kilometres to see it. We veterans do at least know a war when we see it.
I would expect the black half of the memorial to be devoid of the maudlin claptrap so loved by today’s politicians. And if B Joyce ever becomes the minister for veterans’ affairs I’ll know there is no hope for this country.