Andrew Bolt: Labor foolishly corrupting Australian War Memorial

By creating a new exhibit on violence against Aborigines, the Australian War Memorial is prostituting itself to Labor’s race war.

How disgusting for the Australian War Memorial to prostitute itself to Labor’s race war.

Has it no respect for those who died to preserve our country, not divide it?

The AWM’s governing council says it’s creating a new exhibit on violence against Aborigines “initially by the British, then by pastoralists, then by police, and then by Aboriginal militia”.

This foolish – and probably unlawful – corruption of the memorial is backed by the Albanese government, so keen to spread race guilt and division.

Matt Keogh, Minister for Veterans’ Affairs, even brayed that “reflection on frontier conflict is a responsibility for all of our cultural institutions”.

In fact, our war memorial should be about the last place to push the “Frontier Wars” story and make Australia seem a bloody sin.

For a start, this is not what the memorial is for, in purpose, spirit or law.

The memorial was created in 1941, during World War II, to honour Australians who died fighting for this nation and its values.

The Australian War Memorial in Canberra. Picture: Gary Ramage

The Australian War Memorial Act 1980, under which the memorial operates, is very clear what Australians we’re talking about, those who “died in active service in war or in warlike operations by members of the defence force”, which “includes any naval or military force of the crown”.

These are Australians who fought for this nation, and not for some tribe.

Who fought for all of us, not just a few, because the whole point of the memorial is to unite.

It is certainly not to remember victims of crimes, reprisals and acts of self-defence by whites, primarily pastoralists, and to stoke racial resentments.

But there’s now a huge push to promote the “Frontier Wars”, and doesn’t war history belong in a war memorial?

Yet note the exaggerations of people now running this line, such as filmmaker Rachel Perkins, whose three-part The Australian Wars is screened by the taxpayer-funded SBS and claims more than 100,000 Aborigines died fighting whites.

Perkins made the same claim, unchallenged, on the ABC, where host Laura Tingle declared “frontier wars … decimated Indigenous communities”.

In fact, the most comprehensive database on Aboriginal massacres, supervised by Professor Lyndall Ryan at Newcastle University, can’t count more than 11,001 deaths – and only then after treating even dubious claims as true and preferring the highest estimates.

The Memorial was created in 1941, during World War II, to honour Australians who died fighting for this nation and its values. Picture: Gary Ramage

Numerous researchers have criticised its findings, and no wonder. Take, for instance, the 70 Aborigines it claims were massacred in 1841 at “Murdering Island” near Narrandera.

The only source Professor Ryan’s website gives for this improbably massive slaughter – for which whites would have been hanged – is a short obituary about a local landowner written nearly 100 years later in The Labor Daily, a union-backed Labor newspaper. It mentions some unspecified reprisal but gives no death toll.

But there’s a more fundamental reason not to trust even the memorial to tell the truth. If it’s so keen to honour Aborigines who died fighting for their tribes, then why include only those who died fighting whites? Why not include the many more who died in wars with other Aboriginal tribes?

Read The Life and Adventures of William Buckley, an 1852 book by John Morgan, quoting the illiterate Buckley, an escaped convict who lived for 32 years among Aborigines and grew to love them.

Buckley says in one tribal battle he lost his brother-in-law and the man’s wife, along with their blind son, who was then roasted and eaten.

Tribal warfare was relentless. Buckley says a corroboree with another tribe ended in a fight that killed 20 people. Shortly afterwards, two boys of his tribe were killed. Then three women and an unspecified number of “boys” died in a war with five other tribes.

Much later Buckley’s tribe lost at least two women and a man in another battle, but that night ambushed the enemy camp and killed three of theirs. The other tribe then fled, leaving its wounded “to be beaten to death by boomerangs”, with the bodies then “mutilated in a shocking manner” and cooked. And on it went.

Multiply the experience of this one tribe by the 500 others. As historian Geoffrey Blainey has noted, the death rates in tribal wars were in some areas clearly worse than what Europeans suffered in their world wars.

So why won’t the Australian War Memorial include these black-on-black dead in its exhibition?

It’s because the memorial is not really interested in history, but in genuflecting to the race war of the left.How dare its board prostitute our memorial to such a terrible cause?