Australian elections are often marked less by what is promised or talked about and more by absences. There’s much about tax cuts but little or nothing about tax rorts, such as negative gearing. Policy area after policy area has such absences.
Perhaps the most glaring absence in this campaign will be the Australian War Memorial and its continuing refusal to properly recognise and commemorate Australia’s very first and most significant war– the Australian (Frontier) Wars. (Defending Country refers to this conflict as the Australian Wars because it was fought by Australians on Country for Country - in contrast with Australia's overseas wars, fought by Australian expeditionary forces for causes often only loosely connection to defending Australia.)
It is extremely likely that not one Labor or Coalition politician or media reporter will raise the Australian Wars issue, unless it is to decry it.
Recently an ABC Four Corners program exposed significant conflicts of interest in the massive, costly and destructive Australian War Memorial building project. The program also reported on the Australian Wars' absence from the Memorial, while giving air time to a Council member, Major General Greg Melick, dismissing the issue, as he has done before. He speaks from a platform representing the RSL, and allegedly for all veterans even though RSL membership is only around a quarter of the total number of veterans and current service people.
What we are seeing are yet more examples of what the anthropologist WEH Stanner in 1968 called 'the Great Australian Silence'. He coined the phrase to describe the 'cult of forgetfulness’, where Australians not only fail to acknowledge the atrocities of the past but choose not to think about them at all. Stanner argued that Australians did this to the point of forgetting that these events ever happened, despite the effects of them sticking out 'like a foot from a shallow grave'.
For the War Memorial and its Council there is nothing like the ongoing Victorian Government Yoorrook Justice Commission, which has confronted the reality of wars in Gippsland and other parts of the State.
It is also important to put the Australian Wars in historical context, and in comparison with other conflicts recognised in the War Memorial. Admittedly, the Memorial has indicated that it might include a minute mention of the Australian Wars in the proposed small pre-1914 gallery: the Memorial's own figures show that the Australian Wars will take up part of just 1.1 per cent of total gallery space after the current redevelopment. That 1.1 per cent (198 square metres) will be shared between the Australian Wars and the expeditions to the New Zealand Wars 1845-62 and the Sudan 1885.
The Memorial has deliberately narrowed its focus on the Australian Wars: it says it will prioritise those who were impacted by the Australian Wars but then went on to serve in the uniform in the Australian military after 1901.
Further context is provided by the duration and impact of the Australian Wars. They are not only our longest war but also one of our most deadly. They lasted more than a century from 1788 to 1934, longer than Europe’s One Hundred Years War in the 14th and 15th centuries and its deadly Thirty Years War in the 17th century.
Around 60 000 Australian soldiers were killed in World War I and around 40 000 in World War II. No-one will ever know just how many First Nations and White people were killed in the Australian Wars, partly because bodies were burned or buried, records never kept or lost, and stories hushed up. The most conservative estimate of the deaths of Indigenous people is 23 000. Other estimates put deaths as high as 122 000.
Yet, at the Australian War Memorial, there is no Roll of Honour for, or recognition of these Australian fallen, and scant recognition that our first and most deadly wars even happened.
If someone at the Memorial is brave enough to raise the issue, they will be hounded by the usual Murdoch attack dogs, along with Council members, Tony Abbott and Greg Melick.
The Memorial Council Chair, Kim Beazley, is well-meaning and concedes the importance of the issue, but seems ineffectual when it comes to driving the Council towards any action beyond that small piece of that small Pre-1914 gallery. Public support might strengthen his resolve. Meanwhile, it seems that those often-repeated words 'Lest We Forget' apply to only some Australian deaths.
'[W]hy, why do we still deny it happened and why, more fundamentally, in the place that calls itself the Australian War Memorial, why do we not give just recognition to the war that actually founded the Australian modern nation?' (Rachel Perkins, Arrernte-Kalkadoon, The Australian Wars, interviewed on Four Corners)
Picture credit: Conflict on the Rufus, South Australia [1866]: Samuel Calvert, engraver, from a sketch by WA Cawthorne, State Library of Victoria: PCINF; IMP 27-07-66 P.308.
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