In December 2023, a group, including the author, launched a new campaign to get the Australian War Memorial to recognise and represent Australia’s first war – the Frontier or Australian Wars.

Needless to say, the AWM has been reluctant to agree, making vague promises about when, where , and how the Wars might or might not be represented.

Admittedly, the AWM was probably distracted by the massively over-budget expansion project it undertook to provide even more space for big-boy military toys.

But there is no argument about how all our other wars are commemorated – from the world’s biggest memorial project, the Great Ocean Road in Victoria, built by veterans during the Great Depression, to small plaques and statues in virtually every town and suburb in Australia.

A common response to the campaign is that the Wars can be recognised elsewhere – the National Museum and assorted other sites are suggested.  Everywhere but the AWM.

When we launched a website for this campaign – the Defending Country Memorial Project – we featured an article about how the Defending Country project began.

We said: For decades the Australian War Memorial Council denied the need for the full recognition of Australia’s first and longest wars – the Frontier Wars – despite the overwhelming evidence of actions which today would be regarded not only as crimes but also in any cases war crimes.

The Defending Country Memorial Project launched a website and a campaign to rectify that glaring omission. The Defending Country Memorial Project website details the overwhelming evidence that the War Memorial is wrong – evidenced in books, colonial records, official reports , and oral histories.

In the 19th century, governments and settlers were clear about their intentions – to wage war on Indigenous Australians. Time and time again, they used the word war to describe their actions.

But some members of the War Memorial Council over the years would have had us believe these were not real wars but events which might best be recorded in a few museums.

Such views show us that the Council does not properly represent the views of Australia’s leading historians, nor many, many veterans.

The Project evolved from Dr David Stephens’ Honest History project, which has produced a series of significant contributions to understanding Anzackery, the militarisation of Australian history by politicians and others, and the many problems of the War Memorial – from the contested rebuilding project through to the cosy club the War Memorial Council has become.

Honest History has also been an invaluable source of information about the books, articles, and resources which enable Australians to understand how commemoration has become a political and not a community program.

During the WWI commemorations, for instance, Dr Stephens highlighted the enormous amount of money spent on WWI commemoration compared with that of other allied nations.

The total spending was more than $500 million of taxpayers’ money.

Indeed, Australia led the world in commemorative spending for World War I, with $8889 allocated for each digger killed in the Great War compared to just $109 per British casualty and a mere $2 for each dead German soldier.

During the commemorations, Dr Stephens said many people were amazed by the spending spree but were reluctant to criticise it. “Spending is important, but commemoration is not the state religion,” he said.

Former army officer, Iraq veteran , and author of Anzac’s Long Shadow , James Brown, was another critic of the spending, saying that in times of tight budgets, every dollar spent on commemorating long-dead soldiers was a dollar not spent on living soldiers with real issues today.

“We’re spending millions on monuments which catalogue every death in World War I, yet until last year no one was tracking the number of returning modern veterans taking their own lives,” Mr Brown said.

At the time, a spokesman for then Veterans Affairs Minister Michael Ronaldson justified the spending, saying, unlike the UK and Germany, Australia was a young nation without a history of conflict when war broke out.

…and that is the big lie of Australian history – a lie the Defending Country Project intends to replace with the truth about our longest war – the war against our First Nations people.

The new Defending Country website demolishes this big lie by bringing together in one accessible place both the critical information about Australia’s real history – not the sanitised version pushed by government commemorative programs – but the overwhelming evidence of the significance and extent of the Frontier Wars.

The website has been launched with a significant detailed analysis of how the War Memorial is trying to evade what is a critical priority in commemorating all our country’s wars.

As another Anzac Day approaches, most politicians will be gearing up for their annual genuflection to our military past while largely ignoring our Frontier Wars.

The draft-dodging Donald Trump has conducted a massive campaign to erase mention of anything they regard as “woke” from historical commemoration. The campaign is so petty that it photoshops the Iwo Jima flag raising and denies the reality of the role of the First Nations Code Whisperers.

Thankfully, the AWM has not been so ready to deny our history. Instead, it procrastinates and offers ill-defined alternatives.

The Albanese Government has made some changes to the AWM Council.   An intransigent Council member, Greg Melick, former National President of the RSL, has left the Council and been replaced by the new National President, Peter Tinley, who may be more enlightened. The Chair, Kim Beazley, is in favour of the Memorial portraying the dignity of resistance by First Nations people, and doing so in a substantial space within a separate section of the Memorial.

But sadly, our War Memorial is still unable to embrace the full reality of our longest and deadliest war and make the words – Lest We Forget – truly representative of ALL our wars.

‍ Defending Country’s founders are: Dr David Stephens, Pamela Burton, Dr Carolyn Holbrook, Professor Peter Stanley, and Noel Turnbull. Defending Country’s Patrons are: Professor Megan Davis, Professor Henry Reynolds, and Professor Clare Wright OAM. Since the original launch, Thomas Mayo has also become a Patron.