We continue to note progress in the War Memorial's nervous shuffle towards change on the Australian Wars. Our post earlier this week was followed up by Steve Evans of the Canberra Times with his piece today headlined 'Frontier Wars to get prominent gallery in War Memorial after policy shift' (pdf from our subscription copy).
Evans quoted the present author:
The Memorial has limped reluctantly towards proper recognition of the Australian Wars. It still has a long way to go: 1 per cent of total gallery space is nothing to get excited about. The Memorial needs to commit to commemorating First Nations deaths in the Australian Wars in the same way that it commemorates the deaths of uniformed Australians in our overseas wars.
Evans repeated remarks from the Memorial's Executive Director Development Wayne Hitches and Director Matt Anderson about the detail and significance of the change, telegraphed at Estimates and in correspondence to an MP. Someone, possibly from the Memorial, pointed out that the 204 square metres of the now proposed Frontier Wars Gallery was about the size of a (singles) tennis court (195 square metres).
There have certainly been many cross-court volleys and dinky little shots in the Memorial's progress to this point. It has been slow to make changes and even slower to explain them. (See: its six media releases this year with not one hint but lots of relative trivia; the Director's recent opaque remarks to Peter FitzSimons; the opening sentences of our previous post.) Steve Evans tries to make some links between changed policy and changes on the Memorial Council - was there a resolution at the Anzac Week meeting of the Council? - but Defending Country believes it is more complicated than that. The unofficial announcement at Estimates was handed off from Director Anderson to Mr Hitches, while previous statements on the subject had almost always been from the Director.
The change at the Memorial is one Defending Country called for in July last year, where we said, 'here's a possible option: put New Zealand and the Sudan into Gallery East, along with South Africa and China, leaving 198 square metres in Gallery West exclusively for the Australian Wars'. (The Director fobbed this approach off; we welcome the change of tactic this time around.)
We also proposed, as additional actions, 'add the words "Australian Wars" to the names of Australian war theatres on the walls of the Memorial [and] add a plaque to the Memorial's Roll of Honour, spelling out that between 20,000 and 100,000 Australians died in the Australian Wars'.
Defending Country would welcome and support progress towards changes like those. There is lots of relevant material on our Defending Country and Honest History websites and we can help Memorial staff find their way through it. The important themes are that deaths of Australian First Nations people defending Country should be treated equally with those of Australian soldiers in uniform in our overseas wars and that this equality of respect will help reduce systemic racism in Australia.
Talking of staff, after some delay the advertisements that Mr Hitches mentioned at Estimates appeared today on the Memorial's website. The Memorial is seeking two First Nations Curators and a First Nations Community Liaison Officer in the Pre-1914 Frontier Wars Gallery. Applicants must show evidence that they are Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander; each position is designated 'Affirmative Measures (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander)'.
It is good to see that the advertisements specify the Frontier (Australian) Wars, rather than Indigenous service in uniform, where the Memorial has devoted much energy in recent years. The search for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander curators, however, should not imply that the issues here are just for First Nations folks to deal with. We have often quoted Prime Minister Paul Keating at Redfern Park in 1992: 'We [white fellers] took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life. We brought the diseases. The alcohol. We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers. We practised discrimination and exclusion.'
Australia's black and white history needs attention from whitefellers as well as blackfellers and that means facing up to what Larissa Behrendt called 'the invasion moment [for] until we do that we will never have found a way to truly share this colonised country' (The Honest History Book, p. 292). This is not about requiring white fellers to feel guilt for what their ancestors did, but asking them to take responsibility, along with blackfellers, for dealing with the intergenerational impacts of colonisation. Along with that responsibility comes understanding and compassion.
The Memorial has the chance to make a great contribution in all of those respects. Defending Country looks forward to working with the Memorial in that endeavour.
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.
We welcome a response from the Memorial and will publish it without amendment, taking account of our Moderation Policy.
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