Update 26 March 2015: is the Memorial now telling five-eighths of the story?
Paul Daley writes at length in Guardian Australia (and in Meanjin in longer form) about Douglas Grant, an Indigenous serviceman in World War I, and asks questions about Anzac centenary commemoration and the Australian War Memorial’s attempts to deal with pressure to acknowledge both Indigenous service in the King’s or Queen’s uniform and Indigenous service in the Frontier Wars.
Douglas Grant’s story, while poignant in its own regard as the journey of a black man raised white, does not help much with resolving the deep contradictions in the War Memorial’s approach to the service of First Australians, in and out of uniform.
With the probable single exception of Douglas Grant, they [Indigenous soldiers] were not considered Australian citizens even while they wore the uniform. They fought for an empire that had taken their land, established a federation that still institutionally discriminates against them, killed their not-too-distant ancestors, under a union flag that symbolised bloody injustice to them. Their experience was definitely unique. The war memorial awkwardly points to the story it tells about Indigenous servicemen when asked about its intransigence on frontier war – even though it will not erect a simple statue to honour the unique experience of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander personnel.
Critics like Alan Stephens have said the War Memorial only tells half the story about Australia’s experience of war. Maybe, with the Memorial’s stumbling progress towards doing something about Indigenous service, it is now getting closer to telling perhaps five-eighths of the story. Maybe. Getting to the next stage, recognising Indigenous warriors out of uniform, is a much bigger step but even more necessary.
Update 22 March 2015: getting things back
Greek-Australian newspaper, Neos Kosmos, reports a speech by Indigenous historian and activist, Gary Foley, on ‘the shared experience of cultural loss’ between Greeks (the Parthenon Marbles held by the British Museum) and Indigenous Australians (currently a controversy over bark etchings from Victoria but many other instances also).
Update 19 March 2015: gargoyles
Lisa Barritt-Eyles discusses the layers of meaning beneath the presence of the gargoyles of an Indigenous man and woman at the Australian War Memorial. For more on gargoyles, scroll down. ‘The claim that the stories represented in the galleries are “our story”’, says the author, ‘confirms the AWM as a site of Australian national identity reproduction – and silences other stories about the foundations of Australia’s nationhood’. Right on, as we have noted elsewhere (compared with here).
Update 15 March 2015: lest we forget the Frontier Wars
Journalism student, Hannah Berzins, presents a video discussing issues to do with commemoration of what has been described as our largest, longest war.
Update 11 March 2015: lifestyle choices and lectures
Paul Daley in Guardian Australia comments on a statement by the prime minister. Three strikes: unoccupied Australia; 1788 as the all-time zinger Australian date; lifestyle choices. On the third strike, Daley asked:
Was it said deliberately, cynically, just to bolster his base? Was it the equivalent of political Dunkin’ Donuts, frisbeed to the reactionaries in his party, in the papers and on the airwaves, who’ve been a bit antsy about all his talk of sweating blood to achieve Indigenous recognition in the constitution?
Funnily enough, Honest History had wondered pretty much the same about the prime minister’s earlier statement alleging Australians were pretty sick of being lectured to by the United Nations. Are such remarks careless or calibrated and, if the latter, calibrated by whom and for whose benefit? Is there a Tea Party in the PMO?
Update 8 March 2015: Yothu Yindi, imprisonment, segregation art
Guardian Australia this week included Jack Kerr on the history of Yothu Yindi’s song ‘Treaty’, Padraic Gibson on whether ‘out-of-home care’ is recreating a stolen generation in the Northern Territory, plus some paintings from an exhibition of the work of late Ngaku (northern NSW) artist, Robert Campbell, junior.
Update 3 March 2015: gargoyles, warriors, Freedom Riders, recognition and imprisonment
Recent days have seen the Australian War Memorial cautiously sidling towards what might be a concession in the way it treats Indigenous Australians. When the refurbished World War I galleries were opened a single journalist picked up in passing a story that 24 out of 26 gargoyles were to be replaced. There was no mention of the reason for the discrepancy. Inquiries by Honest History of officials at the War Memorial met with the oral and email equivalents of blank looks. Among those in the Memorial’s diaspora with long memories there were mutterings about issues to do with asbestos and deteriorating sandstone.
While most of the gargoyles, dating back to 1941, were native flora and fauna, numbers 25 and 26 were representations of an Indigenous male and an Indigenous female. It emerged that a tender had indeed been let for replacement of 24 gargoyles with 24 new ones made of better sandstone. It became officially clear that asbestos was the problem and that the fate of the two problem gargoyles – into storage or on display either where they were or more discreetly – would be subject to community consultation. Commentators could be found on both sides – remove the gargoyles or leave them there as an indicator of the way we were. The Memorial’s Indigenous Liaison Officer weighed in.
In some respects, though, the most interesting question was how the resolution of the gargoyles issue, whatever it might be, related to other more vexed issues that the Memorial has, perhaps reluctantly, on its plate to deal with: whether and how to commemorate Indigenous soldiers – that is, men who have worn the King’s or Queen’s uniform – and, even more vexed, how to resist pressure to commemorate Indigenous warriors who did not wear such uniform and, indeed, who fought against those who did. (We understand that there is a persistent military tradition not to give too much lee-way to the Queen’s enemies, even when they are dead.) In dealing with the gargoyles, the Memorial gave off the distinct impression of not wanting to open Pandora’s Box. Amy McQuire in New Matilda, Paul Daley in Guardian Australia and Primrose Riordan in Fairfax discussed the issues.
Whatever complex motivations lurked behind the gargoyles, confronting the issues rather more directly was Tim Flannery, former Australian of the Year.
What kind of courage does it take [Flannery asked] to stand and face certain death at the hands of men on horseback, armed with rifles, as did those 52 Aboriginal warriors [at Fighting Hills, in modern Western Victoria in 1840]? They died for family and country as bravely as any soldier ever did.
Flannery made a crucial comparison:
[I]n this centenary year of Gallipoli and the creation of the Anzac legend, an important wrong remains unaddressed. The feats of the bravest Australians ever to die in conflict remain unacknowledged. These heroes were Aborigines who sacrificed their lives defending family and country in Australia’s frontier war, which raged across the country between the 1790s and the 1930s, as European settlers pushed Aboriginal people from their land.
A century and a quarter after Fighting Hills, Indigenous and settler Australians confronted racism and bigotry in western New South Wales. Fifty years after that some of them and others re-enacted the 1965 Freedom Ride, which had been led by Charles Perkins.
The ABC (and guests) did its best to sum up the issues surrounding constitutional recognition though no-one seemed able to explain the current delay. ‘By recognising Indigenous people’, said Marcia Langton, ‘we put that foundation into the Constitution, we overcome the hangover of Terra Nullius, the constitution is then absolutely clear that we do exist in the nation-state’. In outback New South Wales, meanwhile, in Freedom Ride territory, Uncle Isaac Gordon tried to address the immense practical problem of Indigenous incarceration. Perhaps we are not all that different from the way we were in the time of gargoyles.
Update 19 February 2015: Frontier Wars story-telling in Canberra; Freedom Ride commemoration
Early shout-out for the Frontier Wars story-telling camp at the Aboriginal Tent Embassy, Old Parliament House Lawns, Canberra, 19-26 April 2015 in association with the March on Anzac Day to the Australian War Memorial. More on the flyer, including Facebook page to keep up to date.
Meanwhile, fifty years on from the New South Wales Freedom Ride, Ann Curthoys, a distinguished supporter of Honest History, who was on the Ride and wrote a book about it in 2002, spoke about the Ride here.
Update 5 February 2015: Monument Australia website
This website has information about approximately 100 memorials and monuments to Frontier Wars massacres, Stolen Generation, Sorry Day, former mission sites, ancestors and other themes and places important to First Australians and thus to all Australians.
Update 3 February 2015: Frontier War tactics
Ray Kerkhove presents a paper on how Indigenous warriors fought against settlers in Southern Queensland in the 1840s and 1850s. Frontier violence and Indigenous resistance has rarely been examined as a case study of military strategy and tactics. The author draws upon studies of guerilla and terrorist conflict outside Australia and compares the Southern Queensland example with other Australian cases.
Update 27 January 2015: First Dog on the Moon cartoon from Guardian Australia
This pungent, poignant comment is here. Originally published 22 August 2014.
Update 22 January 2015: Australia Day reflection
Henry Reynolds writes in New Matilda about whether Australia Day is sustainable as a national day, particularly because of the difficulties of Indigenous and settler Australians ever finding common ground regarding what is celebrated (by some of them) on 26 January.
There are [says Reynolds] several symbolic and easily achieved ways in which the nature of Australia Day celebrations could be re-oriented. There should be public recognition of British legal usurpation and the disasters that followed. Even more potent would be the nation-wide call for a minute’s silence to remember the thousands of Aborigines and hundreds of Europeans who died in the frontier wars.
If they are too difficult to institute, it would clearly suggest that we need a new national day.
Update 18 January 2015: Catching up with some items
Penny Edmonds writes about massacres of Indigenous Australians at Goonal on the Gwydir River and elsewhere. ‘The flood of coverage of the centenary of Gallipoli and the first world war profoundly shapes the way we think of Australia’s history; but we suppress other violent events in our own country that also shaped us.’ A book edited by Edmonds and Kate Darian-Smith entitled Conciliation on Colonial Frontiers: Conflict, Performance, and Commemoration in Australia and the Pacific Rim is to be released in Februry 2015.
Paul Daley argues that Indigenous soldiers who fought for Australia deserve their own monument in Canberra. See also other references noted below.
Sandra Phillips discusses books by five Indigenous authors, responding to the claim by then Professor Barry Spurr disparaging Indigenous writing. The authors mentioned are Alexis Wright, Kim Scott, Kevin Gilbert and the contributors to two collections.
John Pilger describes Australia as the land of excuses, rather than the fair go, discusses his film Utopia, and calls again for a treaty with Indigenous Australians.
“In the 1960s [says Pilger], Australia had the most equitable spread of personal income in the world. The great myth was then more than half true: it was a land of some kind of fair go. Certainly not for Aboriginal people, and for others, but it was in terms of the equitable spread of income.” All this has changed, he says.
“During the Hawke years, as during the corresponding years of the Thatcher government, the transfer of wealth, from the bottom to the top, was epic. That was done by a Labor government, by the treasurer, Paul Keating, and by the prime minister, Bob Hawke. So the ground has been well and truly laid for the inevitable – that is, an extreme political system now implemented by the Abbott government.”
Material from 2014