Opinion: Aboriginals are Australia's forgotten war veterans

Monday, April 18, 2011  

"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."

Get the Story:
Paul W. Newbury: Forgotten Aboriginal war heroes (Eureka Street 4/18)