This will be posted as a new FAQ, adding to the existing collection.
There are cultural sensitivities attached to recognition of First Nations deaths in the Australian (Frontier) Wars. It is important that the War Memorial treats these deaths with respect and deep consideration.
There is more to it than that, however. The Frontier Wars are just as much whitefellers' history – and whitefellers' business today – as they are blackfellers' history and business. White settlers, soldiers and police died in these Wars, though in far, far smaller numbers than First Nations people.
More importantly, confronting and coming to terms with this part of our Australian history is just as much a matter for whitefellers as blackfellers. As then Prime Minister Paul Keating said at Redfern in December 1992:
It begins, I think, with that act of recognition. Recognition that it was we [whitefellers] who did the dispossessing. We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life. We brought the diseases. The alcohol. We committed the murders.
Or as Eualeyai-Kamillaroi historian (and Defending Country distinguished Supporter) Professor Larissa Behrendt AO wrote in 2017:
For Indigenous people, the perennial questions posed by that moment of invasion in 1788 are about the best strategies for surviving it and determining how to assert Indigenous identity, culture and sovereignty as it faces assaults from the dominant culture every day ... For the rest of Australia[whitefellers], there is the challenge of how the dominant national narrative –the story the nation tells itself – deals with the invasion moment (The Honest History Book, p. 238).
Blackfellers and whitefellers alike need to face up to ‘the invasion moment’, Behrendt said, for ‘until we do that we will never have found a way to truly share this colonised country’ (The Honest History Book, p. 292).
There is a risk that an overemphasis on cultural sensitivity cuts across historical honesty – confronting that invasion moment, colonialism and its continuing effects. Similarly, the Memorial’s long-running mission to recognise Indigenous service in uniform, while important, has risked diverting attention from the bigger issues of frontier conflict.
Defending Country President, Professor Peter Stanley, recently wrote about research related to frontier conflict:
This research increasingly follows protocols giving Indigenous individuals and communities a voice in how their history is researched and recorded; an understandable development given their history of paternalism and disempowerment, but one which carries the hazard of allowing communities to dictate or censor researchers’ interpretations (Beyond the Broken Years, p. 185)
There are already enough obstacles in the way of an honest rendering of Australia’s black and white history, without adding more.
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