When you've been following the Australian Wars as long as we have, you can smell a red herring a mile off: it's something that gets flung across the path to distract you. There are also dry gulches, avenues that look promising but get you nowhere you want to go.
Here's a list of red herrings and dry gulches often put up by players bent on preserving or retreating from the status quo. There are also some responses from Defending Country. We are happy to debate them.
1. Frontier conflict saw First Nations Australians killed by British troops or civilian settlers, not Australian troops, so frontier conflict has no place in the Australian War Memorial.
Response: The key point is that First Nations Australians died defending their Country on their Country, just as Australian troops sent overseas believed they were defending their country, Australia. Defending Country is the common thread that binds together all those men and women who should be depicted and commemorated in the Memorial; they defended their country, whether they were wearing military uniform or not. The difference is that the Australian Wars were our first, longest and most significant war; they determined the ownership and sovereignty of Australia. There has been a long-standing refusal to recognise that.
2. We should focus depiction and commemoration on those First Australians who, despite what had been done to them, still fought for the King or Queen.
Response: Of course, First Nations people who served Australia should be remembered but the effort to identify all of these men and women should not detract from the task of depicting and commemorating the much larger number of First Australians who died defending Country but did not go on to fight for the Crown. There is a risk that it will so detract: the effort to identify Indigenous service people may overshadow the recognition of our most important war.
3. Frontier conflict certainly should be depicted and commemorated, but not in the Australian War Memorial.
Response: This is not an 'either-or' question. First Nations people who fought and died defending Country should be depicted at the Memorial, at the proposed Ngurra precinct, at the National Museum, the National Library, the National Gallery, and the National Archives, at State shrines and museums, and at memorials on the sites of First Nations resistance and massacres of First Nations people. This is no different from the deaths of Australians in uniform being marked at these national and State cultural and commemorative institutions, at memorials in towns and villages, and in war cemeteries overseas, as well as at the Australian War Memorial.
4. The figures for deaths in frontier conflict are notoriously unreliable, in contrast with the deaths meticulously recorded on the Memorial's Roll of Honour.
Response: Deaths in the Australian Wars are somewhere between 20 000 and 100 000. The uncertainty about numbers is to a large extent due to the concealment of deaths, the burning and burial of bodies, and the suppression of records. As to the lack of names of the dead, this did not prevent commemoration of the Unknown Australian Soldier. How much more worthy of being marked are the deaths of tens of thousands of unknown Australians.
5. Non-First Nations Australians should not be expected to feel guilt for events that happened long ago and for which they were not responsible.
Response: This misses the main point. The main point is not feeling guilty but instead feeling a shared responsibility to deal with the intergenerational trauma resulting from colonisation. We remember uniformed men and women who died in service of their country, even though this service occurred decades ago and, in many cases, no-one alive today knew these men and women. Why then do we not remember First Nations men, women and children, who died during the resistance and massacres of the Australian Wars which lasted till at least 1928? Lest We Forget applies in both cases.
6. The mantra 'nothing about us, without us' applies to frontier conflict, even to the extent that only First Nations people are entitled to tell stories about it.
Response: The Australian Wars are about non-First Nations people as much as about First Nations people. The 'us' here is all of us; these are stories about Australia's history, Black and White. As then prime minister Keating said at Redfern in 1992, 'it was we [Whites] 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. We took the children from their mothers. We practised discrimination and exclusion. It was our ignorance and our prejudice. And our failure to imagine these things being done to us.'
7. Frontier conflict is 'sorry business' for First Nations people and should only be presented in a culturally safe way and by First Nations people.
Response: Of course, presentation needs to be sensitive and aware but it has to consider also the need for today's Australians, Black and White, to confront our history, Black and White. For the reasons outlined in the previous paragraph, presentation - and consultation about what is to be presented - needs to involve Whites as well as Blacks. There are risks that a disproportionate emphasis on sensitivities will play into the hands of those who wish to suppress our history.
Does all of this matter?
Yes, it does matter. As our discussion above shows, those red herrings obscure truths, the dry gulches take us way off track. All of them can be used as obstacles to change, particularly where unscrupulous actors batten on to the concerns of First Nations people. In the Australia of 2026, surely it is time to bury those red herrings and block off those dry gulches.
For supporting analysis and argument, please consult our posts under 'About' and 'Australian Wars' and search 'News' under relevant search terms.
Picture credit: 'Mounted Police and Blacks', an 1852 lithograph by WL Walton, depicting the killing of Aboriginal warriors at Slaughterhouse Creek in 1838 by colonial police troopers (AWM). For many years, this lithograph, without caption, was the only Australian Wars item in the War Memorial's 'Colonial conflict' gallery.
Defending Country will publish (subject to our Editorial and Moderation Policy) without amendment any comment the Memorial wishes to make on this post.
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