Defending Country has been on vacation for a few days while keeping in touch. These four items popped up while we were away; we do not necessarily endorse any of them but a couple left us scratching our heads - and occasionally cackling derisively. We'll leave the reader to decide which these were.
‘I have shame, a lot of it. Shame it took so long to uncover the truth’, Hugh Selby, Canberra City News, 2 October 2025
Selby has a legal background and is a regular columnist for CCN. His article here forensically examines (and mostly dismisses) the arguments in defence of Ben Roberts-Smith. The nub of Selby's argument comes right at the end. The heading is a quote from the BRS-defender:
Shame on you
Yes, I have shame, a lot of it. Shame that it took so long to uncover the truth. Shame that the Australian War Memorial still holds this man out as a hero. Shame that he wears medals that should not be seen on his chest. Shame that among the best of our courageous fighting folk we have a protected killer of the innocent.
But I also have pride. Pride in the grit and determination of those who worked to uncover the truth. Pride in the selfless values that many in our ADF strive to inculcate in all those with whom they work.
'Bomber’s war on wet-blankets and woke warriors', Anonymous, Canberra City News, 1 October 2025
This piece, perhaps fortunately anonymous, is scurrilous and unfair to Kim Beazley. It is, however, fun to read. Here's a flavour:
Ben Roberts-Smith is the closest thing we have to a real-life Action Man doll. That square jaw, those rippling guns of steel, the chiselled abs, the manly growth of …
But it’s not just Ben. These woke warriors also want us to include displays on the “frontier wars,” where Aborigines defended their country against the English. Guys, the Aboriginal artillery back then was just spears! I mean, seen one spear, seen ’em all.
To be clear, the article is satirical and the illustration faked. Kim Beazley has done much to bring the Memorial to its current (incomplete) state of awareness of the Australian Wars.
'Part I: A Spear to the Heart of the AWM', Robert Hill, Quadrant, 2 October 2025
This article is not satirical, though we could not find any biodata on the author. Hill frothes at length about the Memorial's choice of Indigenous art works, the history of Private William Punch - the War Memorial needs to look closely at this bit, considering how much store it places on Punch's story - and ends thus:
A memorial that ceases to unite all Australians ceases to be a shrine. It becomes something else entirely: a theatre of activist display, enshrining a narrative of grievance in place of national remembrance, and seeking to invalidate the very nationhood for which Australians fought and died.
Hilll does not seem to have considered that defence of country applies both to First Australians fighting invaders and to uniformed Australians sent overseas.
'Part II: Spearing the AWM', Robert Hill, Quadrant, 3 October 2025
Hill's tirade continues, here targeting the Australian Wars and what he thinks the Memorial proposes to do about them. The Memorial, says HIll,
is under sustained ideological attack - a campaign set to culminate in the planned Frontier Conflicts exhibition of 2028. This project rests on the activists’ anachronistic and fallacious invention of “Frontier Wars,” projected backwards into a past where no such wars existed.
The article contains more art criticism, scepticism about the numbers of Indigenous servicemen in uniform (discounting years of research at the Memorial), some useful speculation about internal divisions within the Memorial, some words about the mealy-mouthed Council decision of 19 August 2022, some analysis of the Memorial's Act, and a peroration that is ignorant - of the decades of attempts to have the Memorial properly deal with Australia's wars, all of them - and rather offensive.
The Council of the War Memorial is charged with a sacred duty: to guard the honour of those who bled and died in Australia’s name. The warriors of Long Tân, outnumbered and outgunned, had no chance, yet they held their ground and turned certain defeat into immortal victory. The warriors of Milne Bay, fighting barefoot in the mud after their boots rotted away, were the first to smash the myth of Japanese invincibility and make the impossible real.
But where men once stared death in the face and prevailed, the cowards of the Council flinched before a handful of activists. They surrendered not to bullets, but to slogans. They betrayed not only the fallen, but the truth itself. It is a capitulation without honour, a stain without excuse, and the majority on the Council who voted for this will mark them forever as the cowards who failed in their sacred trust. [More ignorance: the Council does not vote, it decides by consensus.]
When it opens, the proposed “Frontier Wars” gallery will be the jewel in the crown for the activists, the culmination of decades of propaganda. Once installed, it will be endlessly cited as “proof” that Aboriginal people were engaged in a war of land never ceded, for if the War Memorial says it, it must be so. Yet it will not be history; it will be politics and ideology enshrined in marble and bronze. Its purpose is not commemoration but indoctrination: every schoolchild who passes through its halls will be taught falsehood as fact, and a national shrine built to honour sacrifice will be twisted into a political stage of lies and deceit.
It would be nice to know more about Robert Hill to try to understand what drives him.
Picture credit: Peter Stanley, May 2025. The new Memorial foyer's southern wall. The Memorial depicted there is way pre-expansion; it is one of the original design sketches c. 1927.
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