On 5 April this year, Defending Country wrote a letter to the Minister for Veterans' Affairs, Hon. Matt Keogh MP, who has ministerial responsibility for the Australian War Memorial. The letter called for amendment of the Australian War Memorial Act 1980 to explicitly require the Memorial to properly recognise and commemorate the Australian (Frontier) Wars in the same way that it recognises and commemorates service and sacrifice in Australia's overseas war. Six months on, we have not received a reply to the letter.
The full text of the letter (with a couple of updates in brackets):
5 April 2024
Hon. Matt Keogh MP
Minister for Veterans’ Affairs
Parliament House
CANBERRA ACT 2600
Dear Minister
Defending Country welcomes your call for Expressions of Interest in filling five vacant positions on the Australian War Memorial Council. This holds the promise of changing the balance on the Council regarding frontier conflict.
This is not enough, however, if the Australian Wars are to be properly recognised and commemorated at the Memorial. Defending Country believes that section 3 of the Australian War Memorial Act 1980 should be amended to make the definition of ‘Australian military history’ include the history of ‘wars and warlike operations after 1788 within Australia and involving Indigenous Australians, including the events leading up to, and the aftermath of, such wars and warlike operations’.
Further, section 5 of the Act should be amended to make the functions of the Memorial include maintaining and developing the Memorial ‘as a national memorial of Australians who have died … (iii) as a result of any war or warlike operations after 1788 within Australia and involving Indigenous Australians’.
There are three reasons for amending the legislation in this way.
First, the Memorial claims two interpretations of the Act allow it to depict frontier conflict (page 25). A 1992-93 interpretation found this conflict came within the definition of ‘Australian military history’ in section 3; a 2013 interpretation referred to the Memorial’s capacity under section 6 ‘to do all things necessary or convenient to be done for or in connection with the performance of its functions’.
Having two interpretations available gives the Memorial unnecessary ‘wriggle room’. Amending the Act as set out above will make it clear what the Parliament expects of the Memorial.
Secondly, the Memorial has previously used its corporate plans to narrow the words of its Act. That is another reason to amend the legislation.
Section 3 of the Act says ‘“Australian military history means the history of: (a) wars and warlike operations in which Australians have been on active service, including the events leading up to, and the aftermath of, such wars and warlike operations; and (b) the Defence Force.’ (Emphasis added.)
From the 2018-19 to the 2021-25 corporate plans, the Memorial’s ‘Mission Statement’ was ‘Leading remembrance and understanding of Australia’s wartime experience’. The 2022-26 and 2023-27 plans dropped the Mission Statement, while retaining an even narrower ‘Purpose’: ‘To commemorate the sacrifice of those Australians who have died in war or on operational service and those who have served our nation in times of conflict’. [Same in the 2024-28 plan. DC]
This narrowing process has allowed the Memorial to get into microscopic examination of what Australians have done during ‘wars and warlike operations’. That is well short of ‘Australian military history’, as defined in the Act, particularly in the lack of reference to events before and after our overseas wars.
The Memorial’s Strategic Plan 2023-2028, published in April 2023, shows a similar pattern. This plan includes four ‘Strategic Pillars’, the first of which is ‘Commemorate, reflect and understand Australian experiences of war and service’. Under that pillar are four dot points, the third of them reading, ‘Advancing the public’s understanding of military history and its connection to the present’ and the fourth, ‘Expanding and deepening our collection, gallery displays, research and online content relating to Australia’s frontier violence’ (emphasis added in both cases).
Including the words ‘frontier violence’ is an advance; they do not appear at all in the current corporate plan (2023-2027, 2023-24 update). [Same in corporate plan for 2024-2028, 2024-2025 update. DC] On the other hand, ‘military history’ and ‘frontier violence’ are dealt with separately in those dot points and frontier violence lacks the ‘connection to the present’ that military history has.
So, war can have present-day traumatic effects for those who make military history, but not for First Nations Australians who suffer intergenerational trauma from frontier violence.
Thirdly, having the Act state clearly the Memorial’s responsibilities on frontier conflict would steer it away from compromises, half measures, and dissembling. For example, its efforts to publicise cases of Indigenous service in uniform – defending Australia overseas – have been seen as a ‘fig leaf’ for its failure to recognise First Nations warriors in frontier conflict – defending Country on Country.
The Memorial has also focussed on cases where First Nations victims of frontier violence went on to serve in the King’s or Queen’s uniform. ‘What we seek to do’, Memorial Director Anderson told Rachel Perkins, director of The Australian Wars, in 2021 (episode 3, Mark 57.00), ‘is to tell the story of frontier violence in the way in which it affected the men and the women who joined the Australian Imperial Forces and went away’.
In other words, despite members of their family being massacred or poisoned, or shot while resisting settler attacks, the test was whether First Nations people still loyally joined the colours. Two years later, Memorial management and some members of its governing Council were still taking that line.
This spin did not match the public statements of successive Council Chairs: Chair Nelson in September 2022 had announced a ‘much broader, a much deeper depiction and presentation of the violence committed against Indigenous people’; Chair Beazley after December 2022 had said the coverage of the Frontier Wars would be ‘substantial’ and in a ‘separate section’.
Then, in September 2023, the Memorial quietly released the Council’s August 2022 decision (after it had been kept secret for over a year). The decision not only showed that preference for portraying Frontier Wars victims who later became uniformed soldiers but also insisted that other national institutions than the Memorial should tell ‘the full story’ of the Frontier Wars. People who had taken the Chairs at their word were entitled to feel misled.
We urge you to ensure that an amending Bill is urgently included in the legislation timetable. Meanwhile, we believe there is a strong case for you to write to the Memorial Council Chair to foreshadow amending legislation along the lines in this letter. That would be a clear signal to the Council to change the Memorial’s approach within the terms of the current Act but in advance of amending legislation.
Yours faithfully
[signed]
(Dr) David Stephens for Defending Country
Early in May, we put a post on this website which presented the content of our letter in slightly different form. We summarised what we wanted: amend the Act to remove the Memorial's interpretive 'wriggle room', end its misuse of its corporate planning process, and stop its dithering and shilly-shallying. (Our Action Plan is also relevant. See also this two-part analysis of recent corporate and strategic plans.)
Since May, we have sent a number of emails to Minister Keogh's office, asking when we might expect a reply to our letter. None of the emails received a response.
Meanwhile, we did see an example of how the portfolio responds to thoughtful letters from members of the community. We titled the post 'misleading stonewalling', which summed it up nicely.
The Veterans' Affairs portfolio is not a model of timeliness or punctuality, as the recent Royal Commission report into veterans' deaths and suicide showed. The lack of response to our letter is, of course, in a different league to the portfolio's dilatory dealing with damaged men and women, but six months is an inordinately long time for the Minister, his department and the War Memorial to sit on this one. Perhaps between them they are putting together a considered and carefully composed response to our considered and carefully composed letter. Perhaps.
Picture credit: Fee Plumley, #frontierwars ANZAC vigil, 24 April 2015 (Flickr, Creative Commons). The Anzac Vigil involved a walk down from Mount Ainslie to the War Memorial forecourt. Meanwhile, the Memorial was doing Anzac Day Eve night-time projections onto the façade. Coexistence of themes is possible: the Anzac Vigil commemorating all our wars, including the Australian (Frontier) Wars; projections onto the Memorial commemorating service and sacrifice in Australia's overseas wars.
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