Our war memorials tell a sanitised and incomplete story |
One-hundred-thousand Australians died in our overseas wars and are rightly commemorated on the Roll of Honour at the Australian War Memorial.
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Perhaps as many First Nations Australians died in the Australian wars after 1788. They receive almost no recognition in the Memorial, which some Australians regard as our most sacred place. (We don't know exactly how many First Nations people died because bodies were burned or buried, bones scattered, and records lost or destroyed.)
Much of the reason for that injustice lies in more than two centuries of the dominant white, Anglo-Celtic Australian culture treating First Nations people as less than human.
Reconciliation Australia's website says that First Nations people "have experienced a long history of exclusion from Australian history books, the Australian flag, the Australian anthem and for many years, Australian democracy. This history of dispossession and colonisation lies at the heart of the disparity between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and other Australians today."
The Australian Wars meant not just the dispossession of First Nations people, but continuing state-sanctioned violence towards them, followed by the "great Australian silence", where most white Australians tried to forget what had happened. Dehumanising the people being dispossessed made that dispossession easier - for the dispossessors.
After the Boorloo/Perth attempted atrocity in January, First Nations advocate and writer Thomas Mayo wrote "my people are the........