Where is the Unknown Warrior’s tomb at the Australian War Memorial?
The tomb of the Unknown Soldier represents Australians who did not make it home from wars abroad. But what about Indigenous warriors killed in battle on Australian soil?
My great-grandmother Nellie Araka was a survivor of a massacre. She took shelter with an Irish miner and subsequently had two children with him. The choices she made to stay alive are in my DNA – my mixed Arrernte and Irish heritage. But I am not unique. Many Australians are descended from families who were swept into the violence of the frontier.
That word “frontier” is a deceptively simple term. It describes a space where two societies meet. The frontier in Australia in 1790 was the bush surrounding colonial Sydney; a hundred years later it was rolling across northern Australia. In this frontier space, there was much human interaction: discovery, humour, friendship, trade, sex, both consensual and not, slavery and death, as Indigenous people resisted occupation of their lands, territory by territory.
The complex nature of these interactions is one reason why many Australians struggle to understand frontier conflict as warfare. It is so different from the more recent wars we are familiar with. Wars fought in trenches, with declarations of war and truce, between people in uniforms and within contained periods of time.
That form of war is much more defined but, as the historian Henry Reynolds has explained in simple but devastating terms, the battles on the frontier should be recognised as war not because of how they were fought, but because of what they were fought about; a way of life and the sovereignty of a whole continent. Indeed, they were the wars that established modern Australia, hence the name “The Australian Wars”.
All reputable war historians agree this sweeping frontier conflict, together, qualifies as warfare. Incredibly, some still deny these wars. Truth remains a controversial topic in this country. Regardless, my family, like so many others, have the hard facts, which are our truth. My family’s Country is locked up in a cattle station we have no access to. Every time I drive past, I am reminded of the legacy of the warfare that happened in Central Australia. This is the experience of our people. But we have never passively accepted the outcome. It is what Marcia Langton calls our “burning desire for justice”.
Growing up, glimpses of this history were revealed to me in brutal shards, passed on by my father, Charles Perkins. We call this “oral history” as it is passed on between family members, over generations. In direct contrast, there was the “great silence” in our Western education. As part of my schooling, I was dutifully taken to the Australian War Memorial. I remember the excursion vividly as a seven- or eight-year-old. Standing in front of one of the displays, depicting trenches, smoky skies, the sound of bombing and guns and the soldiers in mud and despair. It affected me in the way a war memorial should, imbuing me with a deep fear of war and its unimaginable grief. But our stories from the period known as “the killing times”, like the massacre of my great grandmother’s family – none of that was part of my formal education.
The parts of the puzzle came together when I was 18 years old and learning to become a filmmaker at the Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association. Standing in a dusty demountable in Alice Springs, I had just read the final pages of Henry Reynolds’ groundbreaking book The Other Side of the Frontier. Holding that slim, devastating book in my hands I was overwhelmed and at a loss of what to do. Ultimately, it led me to make the television series on The Australian Wars for SBS and to become coeditor of a new book, also called The Australian Wars, which presents the first continent-wide examination of the circumstances under which this violence unfolded and the systematic process of colonisation that enabled it. The book also makes the case for having The Australian Wars represented in The Australian War Memorial – which is, after all, an institution that commemorates the experience of war for the Australian people.
In arguing for this inclusion, I have heard it said that the memorial is not the place; that the National Museum is where we should take the commemoration of the dead and our stories, apparently to sit alongside the stuffed crocodiles, dinosaur skeletons and 1960s cars on display. But recently, there has been a shift in policy. The first Aboriginal person, Lorraine Hatton OAM, has been appointed to serve on the memorial council, the first in its 80-year history, and there are now plans afoot to more fully represent The Australian Wars.
It is worth remembering that the founder of the memorial, historian Charles Bean, envisioned the War Memorial as a place for Australian families to grieve their dead, whose bodies, because they had fought in wars overseas, would never be returned or even located. This is why it is a sacred place. It is a symbolic gravesite for the many thousands of dead who won’t be brought home or ever recovered.
For most Aboriginal people who died during the Australian Wars, their bodies will never be located – which was deliberate. The usual approach was to dismember the bodies, then burn the parts in bonfires and finally, scatter to the wind the tiny particles of bones that remained to eradicate the evidence.
In more unusual cases, such as where my family were slaughtered, their bodies were left where they lay, their bones bleaching in the sun, for so long that the site became infamous for it, “Blackfellows Bones” marks the place on the map.
Hundreds of these sites of violence are laced across the continent. It would take a lifetime to tell the stories of them all. As Marcia Langton wistfully told me: “We can’t know how many bodies were hidden … With all of the piles of the bodies that were burnt, we can’t know.”
This is the purpose of a war memorial. It is for people to be able to remember and reflect on the fallen. Yet Aboriginal people cannot go there to commemorate those who died in the Australian Wars. Imagine, if like other Australians, we were welcome to stand at the War Memorial and commemorate those who died in the Australian Wars.
My hope is that it will happen in my lifetime. Why? Because regardless of your family being directly involved or not, and whether you accept it or not, the fact remains; the quality of life we enjoy in this country is founded on the battle for this country, the Australian Wars.
This is an edited extract of an essay by Rachel Perkins, from a new collection titled The Australian Wars, edited by Perkins, Stephen Gapps, Mina Murray and Henry Reynolds, which examines in detail the frontier wars that raged in Australia for more than 150 years, and ends with a call for an Unknown Warrior to be placed alongside the tomb of the Unknown Soldier in the War Memorial
The Australian Wars
Edited by Rachel Perkins, Stephen Gapps, Mina Murray, Henry Reynolds
Allen & Unwin, Non-fiction history
$59.99
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