As Anzac Day draws near, we prepare to celebrate the 102,000 Australian men and women who lost their lives in defence of their country. Anzac Day commemorations tend to neglect the history of the many Indigenous Australians who also died in defence of their land.
Until the 1970s, a myth dominated Australian history that the continent was settled peacefully. Then research of the historical record inspired by Australian anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner brought that fiction to an end.
The Frontier Wars raged across the continent for 140 years. Historians generally regard the wars to have ended in 1928 with the killing of 31 Warlpiri people by a police punitive party at Coniston in the Northern Territory.
In 1979, distinguished Australian historian Geoffrey Blainey proposed that the Australia War Museum (AWM) commemorate the Frontier Wars. The idea has been raised a number of times since by historians including Henry Reynolds, but the AWM steadfastly refuses to consider the matter.
This is a moral issue — it is incumbent on non-Indigenous Australians to own our past and accept that our British antecedents perpetrated wrongs against Australia's Indigenous peoples.
War memorials honour the fallen in battle and celebrate sacrifice and valour in war. They are central to our national identity. We should commemorate Indigenous people who fell fighting British invaders on their lands.
A number of Australian historians have proposed that the AWM erect a memorial to Indigenous Frontier War dead alongside existing sculptures commemorating Australian war dead that line Anzac Avenue in Canberra leading to the War Memorial.
The War Memorial Council says frontier conflict falls outside its charter, a claim that is disputed by historians and military academics. The Returned and Services League of Australia (RSL) also rejects the proposal.
The Frontier Wars began in 1790 when Bidgigal resistance hero Pemulwuy killed Governor Phillip's convict gamekeeper for his abuse of Aboriginal women. In response, Phillip ordered a punitive expedition to bring back any six Bidgigal or their heads. Though the expedition failed, Phillip's order foreshadowed countless such wanton reprisals against Indigenous people for the next 140 years.
Pemulwuy was said to be at the head of every raid on settler farms. In October 1802, two settlers shot and killed him. Pemulwuy had led his peoples' struggle against the invaders for 12 years.
In 1795 in the Hawkesbury-Nepean area, Dharug people began to raid farms, and there were a number of deaths on both sides. In response, Governor Macquarie sent the British 46th Army Regiment to quell the conflict. The conflict known as the Hawkesbury Wars lasted till 1816.
Aboriginal warriors fought an economic and physical war against settlers, raiding farms and pastoral runs. They killed settlers and their servants, destroyed cabins and farm buildings, and razed crops in incendiary raids. Aboriginal people fought the invaders on a tribe by tribe basis — they were sovereign peoples defending their lands.
They used the element of surprise, emerging suddenly from the bush in swift and effective guerrilla raids. They took thousands of cattle and sheep annually. They were known to erect yards to enclose sheep and consume them at their leisure.
In the early years, many settlers abandoned their runs for economic reasons as well as the terror and panic Aboriginal attacks generated. In a battle between the Duangwurrung people and George Faithful's party near Benalla in 1838, natives killed eight of his men. Faithful wrote of Aboriginal women and children running between his horse's legs to retrieve spears for their warriors to reuse.
Indigenous people resisted fiercely but military police and settlers equipped with horses and rifles eventually overwhelmed them. They died defending their homelands, sacred sites and lifestyle.
The historian Richard Broome says Australia's frontier history was a bloody one. He estimates that frontier violence was responsible for around 1700 European deaths while Indigenous deaths were at least ten times that number.
To say that the Frontier Wars do not fit the AWM mould is to exclude a whole people from commemoration based on a trifle. If Indigenous peoples could go to the War Memorial with their families to see a portrayal of their resistance heroes and a testimony to their ancestors' tenacious struggle for their land, what a boost to their morale it would be.
Such a memorial would be an acknowledgement of a long repressed aspect of our past, and an abiding act of reconciliation.
Paul W. Newbury is a writer from the Southern Highlands of NSW. In 1999, he was editor and principal author of Aboriginal Heroes of the Resistance: from Pemulwuy to Mabo.