The September issue of Australian Book Review has Jeremy Martens' review of Lauren Benton's They Called it Peace: Worlds of Imperial Violence. The review is behind a paywall but there is a podcast where the reviewer reads his review. Benton writes about imperial 'small wars' from the fifteenth to the twentieth century. While Benton looks in some detail only at Tasmania 1824-32, the opening paragraph of Mertens' review places Australia in context:
The Australian War Memorial (AWM) is unique among the former settler Dominions in our reluctance to acknowledge as warfare violent conquest and dispossession of Indigenous peoples. The national war museums of Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa all contain exhibits dedicated to military conflicts between First Nations and European colonisers, yet the AWM has for decades refused to heed calls for a frontier war gallery at Mount Ainslie. As veteran journalist David Marr noted earlier this year, while the AWM saw fit a decade ago to memorialise explosive detection dogs and their handlers, ‘we haven’t yet found the space in those halls to commemorate the war that is the basis of our country’s existence’.
A quick scan of the equivalent institutions in Canada (Gallery 1 of the Canadian War Museum, Ottawa), New Zealand (the New Zealand Wars 1845-72 at Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington), and South Africa (Ditsong National Museum of Military History, Johannesburg, covers the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879) confirms our Australian backwardness by comparison. When will that backwardness end?
Picture: detail from the cover of the book
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