In recent issues of Wartime, the Australian War Memorial's magazine, the Memorial's director, Major-General Steve Gower, and I have disagreed about whether or how the institution should recognise conflict between Europeans and Aborigines on the colonial frontier. He invited me to put my view, but then declined to publish an article I wrote as ''inappropriate''. This is it.
Over the past 30 years, historians have recognised that intermittent armed conflict accompanied the European settlement of Australia. This recognition is not limited to scholars of indigenous history, though they have amply documented the fact of that conflict. Military historical authorities at the Australian Defence Force Academy, including Jeff Grey (in his A Military History of Australia), John Coates (Military Atlas of Australia) and John Connor (The Australian Frontier Wars) all present it as a part of Australia's military history.
The Memorial's current stance excludes frontier conflict from both collection and display. It recognises the conflict in the ''colonial wars'' gallery, in one sentence of text and the display of an engraving of the ''Slaughterhouse Creek'' massacre of 1838. For over 25 years I have argued that the Memorial ought to recognise the historical reality of Aboriginal-European violence.
The Memorial's view is based on a particular reading of the Australian War Memorial Act, arguing that it should be concerned only with the Australian Defence Force and its predecessors: in short, only with forces of the Crown raised in Australia. The combatants in the frontier wars (at least on the European side) were largely neither Australian nor military, it argues, so the frontier wars fall outside its ambit.
Fair enough, you might think, except that there are substantial arguments on the other side. Let me put my own view.
The legalism entailed in the Memorial's current position is not the only way to read the Act. In any case, it isn't evident in other parts of the Memorial's collection or galleries. The collection contains thousands of items relating to non-Australian forces. The galleries include displays on Allied and enemy forces, including Turks in the Great War, Americans in World War II and Vietnamese forces in the new post-1945 galleries. So it seems that forces other than the ADF and its precursors can be a part of the Memorial's collection and displays quite rightly, if we are to understand Australia at war fully.
But even acceptance of the Memorial's narrow, legalistic attitude shouldn't prevent it from recognising the issue fittingly. In fact, a Military Mounted Police was formed in Australia, in Sydney, in 1825. Its members conducted armed ''campaigns'' against Aboriginal resistance on the pastoral frontier in NSW. They fought Kamilaroi warriors at Slaughterhouse Creek. This alone would satisfy the legality on which the Memorial has hung its hat.
But whether the museum that explains Australia's military history to Australians and to the world accepts this fact shouldn't rest on one legal definition or another. As we know, Australia's understanding of its military history has evolved over time.
Once, civilians were marginal to the stories told in the Memorial's galleries; now they are included. The depictions of ''enemy'' perspectives or the realistic representation of war have also changed. One major change in the historical and the broader Australian community has been to recognise the existence of a conflict that was once denied the frontier wars. It is time for the Memorial also to acknowledge their part in Australia's historical experience of wars.
This entails a change, certainly, and it is understandable to be cautious in changing a great national institution. The Memorial is both museum and memorial. It commemorates those who have served and suffered in the nation's service, and it is a repository of sources that explain what war was like and how it was fought. The commemorative purpose and the need to reflect history honestly can create tensions. But ignoring the facts of the past is surely not justified in a pluralist nation such as ours especially when doing so continues to hurt an indigenous community demoralised by a society that has for so long disregarded its understanding of its past.
Acknowledging the fact and the character of frontier conflict as indigenous Australians would want would not diminish or detract from the Memorial's commemorative purpose. Indeed, it would show that we take our history seriously enough to try to present the past honestly.
Certainly the representation of the savage and often sordid conduct of the frontier wars might sit uneasily with the Memorial's traditional commemoration of the nobler qualities of Australia's servicemen and servicewomen. But all war is ugly, and the nature of what was arguably a war of conquest should not deter us from facing it.
More than a year after Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's apology signalled a new honesty in acknowledging the wrongs done to indigenous Australians, is it not timely for the Memorial to re-consider its position? It is time, I suggest, to put aside the refuge of legalism and in a more generous spirit to recognise frontier conflict as a part of Australia's military history. That history might be uncomfortable, but a post-apology Australia surely has the maturity to face yet another uncomfortable aspect of its history. Acknowledging it would surely help to heal the hurt that remains as its legacy.
Dr Stanley is director of the Centre for Historical Research at the National Museum of Australia. Working at the Memorial from 1980-2007, he was its principal historian.
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