The Australian War Memorial (AWM) is unique among the former settler Dominions in our reluctance to acknowledge as warfare violent conquest and dispossession of Indigenous peoples. The national war museums of Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa all contain exhibits dedicated to military conflicts between First Nations and European colonisers, yet the AWM has for decades refused to heed calls for a frontier war gallery at Mount Ainslie. As veteran journalist David Marr noted earlier this year, while the AWM saw fit a decade ago to memorialise explosive detection dogs and their handlers, ‘we haven’t yet found the space in those halls to commemorate the war that is the basis of our country’s existence’. Kim Beazley, appointed in 2023 to chair the Australian War Memorial Council, recently signalled a shift in direction and has promised that the AWM will soon ‘give the Aboriginal population the dignity of resistance’.
...
(read more)
