Learning the truth - remembering the frontier wars and what happened in the NT gulf country

Kim Beazley raised a difficult issue in a Remembrance Day speech at the Australian War Memorial this past week.

Aboriginal people who fought European settlers during Australia's colonisation should be recognised alongside diggers who have served overseas, former opposition leader Kim Beazley says.

In a Remembrance Day speech at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra on Wednesday, Mr Beazley called for the creation of "interpretation centres" and memorials to recognise the frontier wars.

A graphic account of the frontier wars in the gulf country of the Northern Territory up until 1910 was provided by Tony Roberts in "The Brutal Truth: What happened in the Gulf Country" in the November 2009 issue of The Monthly. What is particularly striking in his account of the death of more than 600 men, women and children in this area is the demonstrated complicity of the South Australian Government in this series of massacres. A copy is up on the Monthly web site Brutal Truth.

Commemorating the Frontier Wars

Thoughtful article by Dean Ashenden "Battle over a war" on different ways of knowing the past and how this relates to arguments about whether and how the frontier wars in Australia should be includd in the Australian War Memorial. What is interesting is the intrusion of the this debate into the realm of the sacred, something Ashenden notes buts does not fully unpack. Still an important contribution that goes beyond the sound bites of pubic controversy to unpack some of the implicit assumptions about history on both sides of the debate.
http://inside.org.au/battle-over-a-war/

More on the issue of civil religion and the australian War Memorial to follow.