BOOK REVIEW | Collective (Dis)remembering: Henry Reynolds’s Forgotten War, the Australian War Memorial, and the Imperative for Change

‘Here is their spirit, in the heart of the land they loved; and here we guard the record which they themselves made.’ (C.E.W Bean, 1948)

The Australian War Memorial (AWM), established by Australia’s official World War One historian Charles Bean in 1948, commemorates the names of every known Australian who has died in our nine overseas wars since 1885: the Sudan War (1885), Second Boer War (1900-1901), First World War (1914-1918), Second World War (1939-1945), Korean War (1950-1953), Vietnam War (1962-1973), Afghanistan War (2001-present), and Iraq War (2003-2011). However, references to the series of skirmishes and battles fought on the Australian frontier between the 1790s and 1920s—now known as the Frontier Wars—remain virtually absent. According to conservative estimates, the Frontier Wars resulted in the death of 25,000-30,000 Aborigines and caused an incalculable loss of tradition, kinship, and identity. So I ask in response to Bean’s epigraph above: Whose spirit? And whose record? The AWM’s selectivity about who deserves a spot in its halls highlights the divide that often forms between history and collective memory. The concept of collective memory was formulated in the 1920s by French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs (1992) to denote the group narratives created and circulated through media over time. While memory can be used to promote reflection, transparency, and growth, the conservatively led AWM has embraced a memory vision that downplays Indigenous suffering to emphasise patriotic achievement and civilisational progress. This airbrushed vision of national identity is the target of Henry Reynolds’s Forgotten War (2013), a bold, timely contribution to the discourse around Indigenous representation in Australian memory.

One of Australia’s eminent historians of settler colonialism, Reynolds considers whether the Frontier Wars should be seen as legitimate warfare, or whether the structural asymmetry of the conflict—the ineffectiveness of Indigenous hunter-gatherer infrastructures against colonial imports such as guns and disease (Diamond 1997)—better meets the definition of genocide via conquest. Reynolds traces how white attitudes towards Aborigines shifted from a focus on control to extermination, once the hope of Aboriginal concession had faded. These discourses intersected with complex lego-philosophical debates in London concerning questions of sovereignty and land rights. But the reality on the ground in these early decades of settlement is Reynolds’ primary concern here, and it is inevitably muddy. The price of granting Aborigines agency in their resistance efforts, he writes, is acknowledging that ‘fears of death or injury [among whites] were justified … [since] settlers were killed in every part of the country for a hundred years’ (103). Yet the colonial instinct quickly set in. Given the conflict’s asymmetry, Reynolds describes how the Aborigines’ reliance on guerrilla tactics were seen as reflections of the ‘primitive’—to be feared and repelled. One of the most shameful reactions to perceived Aboriginal ‘savagery’ was the mobilisation of ‘punitive expeditions’, a disproportionate form of retaliation which often resulted in the slaughter of thousands of Indigenous men, women, and children. The last officially sanctioned ‘punitive expedition’ occurred from August 14-October 18, 1928, in Coniston, Central Australia, which left between 60 and 200 Aborigines dead. A dark history. A black history, to speak in double entendre.

Granted, the AWM would wager that the Frontier Wars were simply not real wars; sporadic incidents, sure, on a sliding scale between lone-wolf murders and heavy-handed police raids, but not the nation-defining, character-moulding, fiery-baptismal encounters that our nine overseas conflicts were. In contrast, Reynolds places the Frontier Wars at the centre of Australian history. The key to such a determination, he believes, lies in the work of war theorist Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831). In On War (1832), Clausewitz defined war as ‘a mere continuation of politics by other means’ (1984, p. 87). Wars are not waged out of emotion or barbarism, nor are they governed by any type of universal principles. While battles and individual survival tales may comprise the more gripping human interest stories of war, Clausewitz suggested that we can evaluate the purpose, success, and/or failure of a war by asking simple, disinterested questions such as: Why was it fought? What were its political objectives? Did it achieve them? When war is severed from politics, it becomes, in Clausewitz’s view, ‘pointless and devoid of sense’ (1984, p. 605).

Overseas wars in which Australians have fought have typically been understood from the perspective of battle rather than policy, largely because of their distance from the Australian land and Australia’s political commitments to the Commonwealth. Our narratives focus on the viscera of military suffering and the poetics of martyrdom—that which Clausewitz argued war is not really about. If we stop substituting strategic interests with abstract metaphors of sacrifice and character development, what did any of our overseas wars truly achieve for Australian nationhood? In the absence of a convincing answer, Reynolds argues that ‘death itself sanctions the cause and places it beyond question’ (250). Clausewitz’s sterile approach to war is out of tune with its inevitable, often intergenerational, trauma. But his framework helps to build a more robust case for why the Frontier Wars should be classified not just as war, but as the quintessential Australian war. It was the only prolonged conflict, if an irregular one, which occurred in Australia and which was fundamentally about Australia. No other war involving Australians concerned the question of land rights to their own continent. No other war, Reynolds insists, saw Australian inhabitants have their entire way of life destroyed and their languages muted.

And not only is the bloody reality of frontier violence harder to stomach than the romanticised portrait of the faraway digger, but the complexities of the Frontier Wars—legal, social, military—are harder to navigate with evidence. Reynolds’s thorough coverage of primary sources, spanning government records, diaries, and newspapers, reconstructs a mélange of colonial doublespeak, domestic confusion, and Social-Darwinian white supremacy. At the same time, the lack of primary sources from Aboriginal perspectives available to Reynolds—beyond oral testimony—highlights a methodological imbalance and epistemological difficulty that inheres in this corner of Australian history. Yet, as Forgotten War makes clear, the difficulties of the archive must not insulate white Australia from its past, for this is a part of colonialism’s legacy.

History and memory are not one and the same. Yet all written history, insofar as it is constructed through processes of storytelling, is ultimately a type of memory—social, political, or cultural. And despite memory’s theoretical underpinnings, its lived effects are unmistakeably concrete. Social and economic stimulus programs for Indigenous Australians, of which John Howard was fond, go some way in bridging the material gap between white and black Australians. Yet they cannot replace a proper reckoning with the history behind this divide, a task more difficult and more courageous. Thus, Reynolds concludes:

A critical question is whether the Aboriginal dead will ever be admitted to the sacred centre of white Australian nationalism, the [AWM]. If they are excluded in death from the pantheon they are excluded from the nation. That is surely axiomatic. We will know that we are all members of the same nation when a shrine in memory of the fallen warriors is placed side by side with the tomb of the unknown soldier (236-237).

Those who disagree, either with this reading of Australian history or with the importance of Reynolds’s demands to reconciliation, would do well to remember William Faulkner’s old quip, ‘The past is never dead. It is not even past’ (1951, p. 73).