The Defending Country campaign believes the Australian War Memorial must properly recognise and commemorate the Australian Frontier Wars as an essential part of Truth-telling and as a first step to reframing Australian national commemoration.
We are Australians, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, who have the primary objective of ensuring that the Australian War Memorial properly recognises and commemorates the Australian Frontier Wars. This objective is a key part of Truth-telling about our history.
Our website is coming up to its first anniversary. Recently, we’ve posted items on these subjects:
- The rush by the new Queensland LNP government to close down after barely two months the state’s Truth-telling and Healing Inquiry? Can’t they handle the truth about the state’s history?
- A study of Australian Wikipedia entries which reveals how overwhelmingly Anglo-Celtic and white they are, and how some Wikipedia authors fight to keep them that way.
- Defending Country Patron Professor Henry Reynolds on what was missing from the King’s recent remarks in his visit to his subjects Down Under.
- First Nations academic Lawrence Bamblett on Indigenous resurgence, which is ‘beyond reconciliation … beyond truth-telling’.
Food for thought on the Defending Country website, but what’s Defending Country all about?
‘Defending Country’ applies to all who have fought for Australia or parts of it. It applies just as much to First Australians (Arrernte, Noongar, Wiradjuri, and others), defending their Country on Country (and dying on Country), as it does to uniformed Australians fighting our overseas wars.
Recognising and implementing the Defending Country theme is the key to the Australian War Memorial’s future as an honest Australian cultural institution, one that owns and acknowledges all our history of war and its effects.
Defending Country is the theme that binds together:
- First Nations warriors who resisted settler-invader, police and military power;
- First Nations women, children and old folk who died with their men or suffered massacre, rape and poison;
- men and women in the country’s uniform (including Indigenous service people) sent overseas to fight for King and Empire, for Australia, or ‘to defend our values’.
All these people believed their Country was threatened and needed defending.
As the War Memorial is Australia’s premier commemorative institution, grounding it in the Defending Country theme should set the tone for institutions and communities across our country. It should also have implications for national days of commemoration, like Anzac Day and Remembrance Day.
Defending Country Patrons and Supporters.
Defending Country Memorial Project Inc.
David Stephens for Defending Country
1 November 2024
