Defending Country tries to keep track of other toilers in the vineyard of the Australian Wars. We've been made aware recently, for example, of the work of Brett Leavy, a Kooma man from Queensland, and winner of Griffith University's Outstanding First Peoples Alumnus Award 2023 for Griffith Business School.
Brett's website Virtual Songlines 'is a sovereign spatial platform for Indigenous cultural heritage — mapping Country, governing traditional knowledge, and delivering immersive heritage experiences to corporate, government, education, community, and public audiences'.
The website's content ranges widely but includes a section on Colonial Frontier Wars which is 'mapping frontier conflict place by place so that communities, educators, and heritage teams can engage with the history that shaped the nation'. Defending Country looks forward to a deep dive.
(In the same space and coming along nicely is the Australian Wars and Resistance website.)
MAJ Samuel White is the Army Fellow at the Australian War Memorial. At the Memorial, he is working with Yolŋu families and communities on the history and continuing legacy of the Northern Territory Special Reconnaissance Unit (NTSRU), which served during the Second World War.
The Memorial's website reports on this work, 'The Miriŋu Project': 'The Miriŋu tradition continues unbroken. In World War Two, Yolŋu Miriŋu joined with ngapiki/balanda (non-Aboriginal) soldiers to form the Northern Territory Special Reconnaissance Unit of the Australian Army, to defend Australia from invasion. Yolŋu soldiers continue this work today comprising the majority of Arnhem Squadron of NORFORCE.'
Samuel is a speaker at the Memorial's Imperialism and Resistance conference in September.
Defending Country believes it is important to present side by side the stories of First Nations warriors in and out of uniform, in this case in the NTSRU and in the Australian (Frontier) Wars.
Defending Country is the theme that binds together:
- First Nations warriors who resisted settler-invader, police and military power;
- First Nations women, children and old folk who died with their men or suffered massacre, rape and poison;
- men and women in the country’s uniform (including Indigenous service people) who fought for King and Empire, for Australia, or ‘to defend our values’.
All these people believed their Country was threatened and needed defending.
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. The so-called Rufus River Massacre was in 1841. It actually included fierce resistance by First Nations people. It is the sort of event that would be covered by a War Memorial firmly and bravely presenting the Australian Wars. Discussion of Rufus River by Amanda Nettlebeck, Journal of Australian Studies, 1999.
