The ‘difficult heritage’ of the Native Mounted Police

Military heritage and Australian identity

Anzac military heritage, as it has been officially cultivated and popularly endorsed, is vital to both Australia’s and New Zealand’s senses of nationhood. ¹ In 1915, the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (Anzac) troops, part of a larger force fighting Germany and its allies under British command, attempted to invade Turkey, at Gallipoli. Although Turkey repulsed the invasion, the valour of the Australian and New Zealand troops in defeat immediately became a national myth, crafted and shaped by Australia’s official war correspondent, C.E.W. Bean, and fostered by Australian governments ever since. Today, the myth continues to fuel pride in assumed national qualities of mateship, sacrifice and courage. At Anzac monuments, each year huge crowds perform rituals that honour ‘the fallen’ on an official national holiday (April 25). In this ‘civic religion’, Anzac exemplifies the Australian ethos at its best. Australia’s subsequent military commitments are evoked as continuing the traditions established at Gallipoli (Holbrook, 2014; Scates, 2006).

However, understandings of ‘Australian heritage’ have been troubled by the fact – of increasing political salience since the 1970s – that Australia is a settler colonial society (Darian-Smith and Hamilton, 2013). Many Australians now ask, ‘Are there not two stories of service and sacrifice to be distinguished – the Indigenous and the non-Indigenous?’ With strong support from the Australian government, custodians of Anzac memory now readily acknowledge that Indigenous Australians were among those enlisted or conscripted to military service: their contributions have been honoured, and government-funded teaching materials have reinforced the idea that Indigenous Australians, too, were patriots who served unselfishly. ² We will call this Binary One: the Indigenous/non-Indigenous binary differentiates the patriotisms enacted through service in Australia’s military forces.

Changes in Australian historiography since the 1970s, however, have highlighted a new narrative of Australia’s ‘coming into being’: nationhood was the achievement of British invasion. Australia’s leading revisionist historian, Henry Reynolds, has argued that what we call Binary One fails to acknowledge that the wars that formed Australia took place not only in overseas military expeditions but also, before and after Federation in 1901, on Australian soil, between the colonisers and Indigenous Australians (see Reynolds, 1981, 1987, 1990, 2001, 2013). Should the colonial conquest of Australia be called ‘war’? If so, should not this war also be part of Australia’s military heritage? Reynolds asserts that the omission of the ‘Frontier Wars’ from official heritage continues the ‘great Australian silence’ about the violence of colonisation. ³ He recommends that if we see wars as formative of Australian experience, we must ‘include them all and not just the ones that suit the preferences and prejudices of the moment’ (Reynolds, 2013: 235). His argument exemplifies what we call Binary Two: the non-Indigenous/Indigenous distinction mapping neatly onto the Invader/Resister distinction that structures the revised history of Australia’s colonisation.

We argue that such readings of Australia’s past render Australia’s war heritage ‘difficult’. Sharon Macdonald’s (2009, 2015) concept of ‘difficult heritage’ emerges from a literature dealing with the politics of representing ‘negative’ aspects of a nation-state’s past − pasts that are ‘recognised as meaningful in the present but that [are] also contested and awkward for public reconciliation’ (Macdonald, 2009: 1). Although difficult heritage ‘threatens to trouble collective identities and open up social differences’ (Macdonald, 2009: 4), it has nonetheless been given material form in museum displays, monuments and state apologies because the strenuous embracing of ‘difficult heritage’ signals to others a nation’s ‘moral cleanliness and honesty’ (Macdonald, 2015: 19). In Australia, public remembrance of the infliction of trauma and violence on Indigenous Australians is contested, but many Australians have committed to tracing the legacies of colonialism (Darian-Smith and Hamilton, 2013), including labelling as ‘Frontier War’ the violent clashes between colonists and Indigenous Australians (Clark, 2016).

We see further important implications in acknowledging that colonisation included the Frontier Wars. The protagonists were not only the colonists as alien ‘invaders’ and Aboriginal peoples as patriotic resisters (Binary Two). Another principal actor in those wars, in Victoria, New South Wales, South Australia and Queensland (the longest and bloodiest deployment), was the NMP – Aboriginal men under colonists’ command who crushed other Aboriginal peoples’ resistance to colonial invasion. ⁴ Scholarship has established that in their pacification of the frontiers, the NMP killed many. ⁵ In what terms are they now to be remembered?

The article proceeds as follows. First, without attempting a comprehensive review of scholarship on the NMP, we point to what we consider to be a symptomatic difficulty in narrating the NMP, exemplified by three texts authored by widely recognised authorities on Australian history. We will argue that their accounts of the NMP sit awkwardly within a narrative that sustains Binary Two: honourable Indigenous/resisters of invasion versus discredited non-Indigenous invaders. Second, we discuss the politics of forgetting: must scholarship always interrogate myth, in service to the truth? We report the views of a focus group comprising those professionally involved in the production and management of Australian collective memory. We conclude by suggesting that adherence to Binary Two encourages resistance to including the NMP in Australia’s military heritage. The resistance comes not only from the will to preserve a story of unified Indigenous resistance but also from those whose renovated national identity rests on recognition of settler-colonial injustice.

The Australian Frontier Wars

There are alternatives to characterising the violent British occupation of Indigenous Australians’ ‘country’ as a ‘war’. Keith Windschuttle (2002), for example, contests writing of Tasmanian Aborigines’ actions as ‘frontier warfare, patriotic struggle or systematic resistance’ (p. 399). He argues that Aboriginal peoples were nomadic hunter-gatherers who did not have a concept of possessing territory or of deterring trespassers from it. He also states that ‘[t]he so-called “Black War” was a minor crime wave by two Europeanised black bushrangers, followed by an outbreak of robbery, assault and murder by tribal Aborigines’. In the course of colonial conquest, as Lisa Ford (2010) shows, the British government’s ‘colonial secretary articulated persistent uneasiness over the capacity of colonial courts to try Aborigines for crime against settlers or to treat their aggressions as acts of war’ (p. 176). Our paper does not take a position on whether Aboriginal violence against settlers should have been treated as criminal acts by British subjects or as aggression by a foreign sovereign; nor do we take a position on how historians should now characterise such violence. Rather, our question is, ‘to the extent that recent historical scholarship frames frontier violence as “war” between a sovereign people and a colonial invader, what difference could that characterisation make to the nation’s official and popular war heritage?’

It has become common for historians to frame the violence of Australia’s colonial frontiers as war, thus enabling the argument that the Frontier Wars should be included in Australia’s military heritage. That colonial violence was ‘war’ is the view not only of Henry Reynolds but also of Richard Broome (1988) and of the multi-authored contribution on the NMP found in The Oxford Companion to Australian Military History (1995). We choose these three texts for three reasons. They are authored by widely respected historians of the violent occupation of Australia, they advance the thesis that historians should see this sequence of violent encounters as ‘war’, and they each consider the question of how this ‘war’ should figure in Australians’ public narrative of their nation’s wars.

In 1988, Richard Broome contributed an essay titled ‘The struggle for Australia’ to a bicentennial collection of papers titled Australia: Two Centuries of War and Peace. The volume was co-edited by historian Michael McKernan, who has written primarily in the areas of Australian military and social history, and Margaret Browne, and co-published by the Australian War Memorial, which is one of the most important national institutions in Australia in creating and sustaining narratives of Australians’ service in wars overseas. Broome’s main target in his contribution was the myth that Australia was colonised peacefully; by using the term ‘war’, he not only emphasised the bloodiness of the colonising process but also offered a certain legal and political framing for the violence. Acknowledging that the invading British did not officially see themselves as conducting a war, he commented:

… if the Aborigines had been seen as a sovereign people or peoples, the British government would have more formally accorded them the status of belligerents once conflict began, which would have brought greater British military fire power against the Aborigines than they in fact had to face. (Broome, 1988: 93)

By choosing to interpret the long series of violent clashes as ‘war’, Broome thus affirmed, contra the official British view, that Aboriginal peoples were ‘a sovereign people or peoples’ and not merely criminal offenders against colonial law. As Broome (1988) argues, notwithstanding the official British view,

The combatants certainly saw the clashes as war and used the language of war to describe them…In European terms it was certainly an unorthodox war, never being declared and guerrilla in style. It was a classic colonial war: limited for the invader but total for the invaded who had nowhere else to go. (p. 94)

The entry to The Oxford Companion to Australian Military History, ‘Aboriginal armed resistance to white invasion’, attributed to the volume’s editors, Peter Dennis, Jeffrey Grey, Ewan Morris, and Robin Prior, with John Connor, similarly presents colonial violence as ‘war’ (Dennis et al., 1995). While a second edition of the Companion has been produced (Dennis et al., 2008), readers of that edition in search of the above entry are redirected to one on the ‘Frontier Wars’, which includes a short passage of just over 200 words dealing with ‘native police’. This is not so much a revision of the entry in the first edition as a severe condensation of it. Because of its length and its sustained focus on ‘native police’, the entry in the first edition better exemplifies the problem that our analysis has identified. In that original entry, the authors acknowledge that ‘war’ is a retrospective framing of the violence: the British did not consider fighting against Aboriginal peoples as ‘war’, both for practical reasons (the colonial Governors’ restricted access to military assets) and for legal reasons (Aboriginal peoples were officially ‘British subjects’). Dennis et al. (1995) note another reason for questioning the label ‘war’ − that most of the fighting to establish British sovereignty was done by civilians and police, not by military units: ‘[a]s a result, this was a war in which there was no clear distinction between combatants and civilians’ (p. 4). They nonetheless agree with Broome that the violent colonial occupation was a protracted ‘war’.

Many Australians now accept this account and they are receptive to the story that before enlisted Indigenous Australians served the British Empire and the Australian nation, they had served in their war against British invasion: the Aboriginal peoples who fought against the British colonists deserve to be honoured as ‘patriots’, too. As Ken Inglis (1998) has noted, where memorials to Australian military service by Indigenous Australians have emerged, the word ‘country’ ‘has acquired a new ambivalence: Once it could mean both empire and nation; here it stands for both the newcomers’ nation and the land they usurped’ (p. 447). In other words, the possible significance of the Indigenous/non-Indigenous binary in structuring military history is not only that Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians were united under Australian military command in wars overseas (Binary One) but also that, previously, they had been distinct in their opposing patriotisms in the Frontier Wars (Binary Two). In this way, ‘patriotic service’ to ‘country’ ceases to be a simple idea; it acquires cultural and political contingency. To represent as ‘patriots’ those who fought against the colonial formation of Australia is ‘difficult heritage’: it unsettles Binary One’s ‘positive self-identity’, the inclusive settler colonial Australia that has been served militarily, in overseas wars, by Indigenous and non-Indigenous people (Macdonald, 2015: 7).

The difficulty of consistently including the NMP in the Frontier Wars

While our three historians present the NMP as protagonists of the Frontier Wars, each falters in certain passages, generalising about Aboriginal fighters in terms that seem to exclude the NMP. For example, Broome (1988) wrote that

the only Aborigines known to have killed with guns are those former police trackers in the north like major [Major?], and also Jack Weatherly, a Western Port man who killed seven Gippsland Aborigines in 1833 … Nor did Aborigines adopt the horse, despite the effective use of horses made by their opponents. (p. 113)

In pointing to Aboriginal fighters’ limited acquisition of guns and horses, Broome seems momentarily to have excluded the NMP (uniformed troopers with horses and guns) from the category ‘Aboriginal fighters’. His usage effectively restricts the meaning of ‘Aboriginal fighters’ to those resisting colonial occupation. This omission of the NMP is also evident in Broome’s (1988) concluding peroration about the implications for ‘reconciliation’ of his narrative of ‘unofficial war’:

Perhaps it is time for Australians of European descent to honour the Aboriginal dead in war memorials: they too fought for their land and culture. Aboriginal Australians might then be more willing to acknowledge violence done as well as violence received. Only through a mutual recognition of past violence can any reconciliation be attained. (p. 120)

‘Aboriginal fighters’ and ‘Aboriginal dead’ thus function in these passages not simply in their strict literal sense but as honorific terms; the two phrases seem not to include the NMP, perhaps because Broome saw no honour in their service to the Crown.

Reynolds’ (1990) discussion of the NMP noted that ‘troopers were frequently in danger and both officers and men were killed and wounded in battle’ (p. 84). It is pertinent here to recall Ken Inglis’ (1998) point that when slain soldiers are to be honoured they are referred to as ‘the fallen’ (p. 49). Are slain NMP described as among the ‘fallen’? In his most recent discussion of the NMP, Reynolds (2013) seems sympathetic to including them among those who should be honoured. That is, illustrating his complaint that the Australian War Memorial has forgotten the wars of colonial invasion, Reynolds (2013) refers critically to the Memorial’s failure to mention the Queensland NMP (pp. 226–227). However, a few pages later, when he uses the phrase ‘Aboriginal war dead’ (Reynolds, 2013: 241–242), he implicitly omits the NMP when he writes that ‘[t]hey died on traditional homelands where their ancestors had lived and been interred for hundreds of generations’ (p. 241). ‘They’, in this sentence, could not refer to many NMP troopers, for they were deployed, as a matter of policy, where their ancestors had not lived. ⁶ This narrowing of the referent ‘Aboriginal war dead’ occurs precisely when Reynolds is dealing with the question of how the ‘Aboriginal war dead’ ought to be remembered. Reynolds does not use ‘the fallen’, but his phrasing of how ‘they died’ seems similarly honorific, in that it implicitly excludes the NMP from his reference to the deceased Aboriginal fighters who should be honoured.

The contributors to The Oxford Companion to Australian Military History ask, ‘In what terms should we characterise Aboriginal fighters?’ In the remarks that follow, which caution that Aboriginal peoples were not simply ‘defenceless victims’, it is not clear whether the authors have the NMP in mind or whether they have silently bracketed them out. Dennis et al. (1995) argue that while recalling them as victims may place contemporary Aboriginal peoples on ‘the moral high ground’, it is

… at the expense of the bravery and fighting skills of their ancestors. Aboriginal people were not passive in the face of White invasion, as both the old myth of peaceful settlement and the new myth of universal massacre imply. Rather they used every means at their disposal to defend their land, their resources and their independence. (p. 12)

Do these words apply to the NMP? Did the NMP defend their land, their resources and their independence? When describing the NMP, Dennis et al. attribute other less noble motives: material and monetary gain, a desire to be recognised for their skills, status above other Aboriginal peoples, and access to women, beyond what was normally allowed to young men. They conclude by calling for ‘simple recognition that Aborigines fought with courage and skill, drawing on their traditions to meet an unprecedented threat’ (Dennis et al., 1995: 12).

Were we to include the NMP in the generalisation that Aboriginal peoples who fought were actuated by ‘traditions’, it would draw attention to a feature of Aboriginal tradition that the white commanders of the NMP were well aware of: their troopers’ social universe was organised around strong distinctions between friends and enemies, the familiar and the foreign. According to Broome (1988), the NMP were motivated by the ‘traditional enmities shared by all Aborigines towards “wildmen” from distant peoples’ (p. 114). By deploying troopers far from their region of origin (their ‘country’), the commanders harnessed such traditions to lethal effect. As Reynolds (1990: 80) argued, such enmities would be consistent with Aboriginal tradition: to be suspicious of, and hostile towards, other Aboriginal peoples more distant.

After close examination of these scholarly accounts, we conclude that when these three historians render the historical fact of the Frontier Wars as ‘heritage’ – that is, as significant history that represents Aboriginal combatants as moral agents in a nation-forming drama – they do not keep the NMP consistently in view. ⁷ Indeed, for authors writing with one eye on the past and the other on how to evoke the past to contemporary readers, the NMP seem to disappear from certain statements about Aboriginal peoples who fought. When reference is made to ‘country’, the effect is to force a reconsideration of that notion. ‘Country’ could refer not only to ‘Australia’ as a whole that Aborigines, as a whole, defended, but also to ‘country’ in a pre-colonial, differentiated sense – the focus of local solidarities that made Aboriginal groups mortal enemies of each other. Recalling Inglis’ (1998) remark that the word ‘country’ ‘has acquired a new ambivalence’ (p. 447), we suggest that when we consider the NMP’s role in the Frontier Wars, ‘country’ becomes more complex still. If such fighting enacted their traditions of love for their country and solidarity with their kin, can we not acknowledge that such traditions divided Aboriginal peoples as well as united them? Love of country evidently grounded the NMP’s fear and loathing of those whom they violently subdued. ⁸

The NMP as anomaly

Let us recapitulate the ways that the Indigenous/non-Indigenous binary can structure the field of military heritage. Binary One structures that field by acknowledging that those who served in Australia’s overseas military exploits included both non-Indigenous and Indigenous Australians: Indigenous service personnel should be distinctly honoured and distinguished from other serving Australians. This is the least controversial way to make the Indigenous/non-Indigenous distinction matter in the nation’s military heritage, and it is strongly supported by the Australian government. ⁹ Binary Two asserts that the Indigenous/non-Indigenous binary should frame the entire military history of Australia as a settler colonial nation-state so that the non-Indigenous/Indigenous binary coincides with the binary of coloniser/colonised. Binary Two allows us to recognise, as formative of the nation, not only the wars that Australia fought overseas (with Aboriginal peoples and Torres Strait Islanders on ‘our’ side) but also the Frontier Wars in which ‘Aboriginal fighters’ were patriots of pre-colonial Australia, resisting the colonial formation of Australia.

Australians are not unified in their approach to Binary Two. ¹⁰ It is ‘difficult heritage’ in the sense of ‘heritage that can disturb a positive self-identity’ (Macdonald, 2015: 7). That is, some Australians would prefer to see the coloniser/colonised distinction as superseded; for them, it refers to grievances past and gone, leaving a unified nation that Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians belong to equally and continue to serve with equal loyalty. Conservative leaders have warned that revisionist history risks being a ‘black armband’ for the nation, perpetuating shame and undermining what they see as justified pride in the nation’s achievements. ¹¹ This perspective has urged Indigenous Australians to stop dwelling on the colonial past and to focus on the opportunities that Australia now gives them. From such a perspective, Australia’s military heritage should be about service in wars fought overseas (when Indigenous and non-Indigenous were on the same side) and should not include the Frontier Wars (when they were opponents). Many other Australians, by contrast, acknowledging that their nation is the unjustly structured product of violent colonising, are committed to disturbing settler Australian identity by including the Frontier Wars and its Aboriginal patriots in Australia’s military heritage. These revisers of heritage are like Macdonald’s (2015) Germans who insist on the morally strengthening process of acknowledging Germany’s ugly past as ‘a performance of trustworthiness’ (p. 19). As Macdonald (2015) argues, ‘self-disclosure and self-reprimanding have, in themselves, come to be widely regarded as a positive development by those inside as well as those outside the societies that are performing them’ (p. 19).

To acknowledge the central role of the NMP in colonial conquest disrupts Binary Two by acknowledging that the Indigenous response to invasion was not unified: the colonising force deployed Aboriginal fighters against Aboriginal fighters, consistent with political formations that were ‘traditional’ within pre-colonial Indigenous Australia. Indigenous Australians, loyal to ‘country’, could position themselves not only as resisters but also as instruments of invasion. If the NMP are to be remembered as protagonists of the Frontier Wars, then that heritage becomes ‘even more difficult’ in the sense that it disturbs the two ‘positive self-identities’ that Binary Two encourages: (1) the identity of Indigenous people wronged by colonisation and proud of their ancestors’ resistance and (2) the renovated identity of those non-Indigenous Australians who, in acknowledging their nation’s violent colonial past and honouring Indigenous resisters as patriots, affirm a morally strengthened national identity.

Scholarly truth and forgetting

The Australian government’s project of ‘reconciliation’, initiated in 1991, has provoked historians to ask what kind of historiography would be conducive to Indigenous and non-Indigenous reconciliation. Bain Attwood argued that we should not hope for an agreed narrative. Uniformity in histories of Australia is not possible ‘as long as any society contains at least two cultural traditions, one that identifies with the colonisers and another with the colonised’ (Attwood, 2005: 255). Furthermore, it is ‘inevitable that there will be conflicting attitudes, opinions and feelings about the colonial past’, and thus Australians should accept that their heritage will be conflicted, ‘mutually unsettling exchanges of diverse histories’ (Attwood, 2005: 256). We ask: how diverse? Could some representations of the past be marginalised because they challenge the political identities encouraged by Binary Two?

There is a struggle in Australia to redefine coloniser identity. In her perceptive discussion of many contemporary Australians’ willingness to say ‘sorry’ to Indigenous Australians, Sara Ahmed (2005) writes that their shame ‘exposes the nation, and what it has covered over and covered up in its pride in itself, but at the same time it involves a narrative of recovery as the re-covering of the nation’ (p. 79, emphasis in original). Historians are conscious of their responsibility for this ‘recovery of the nation’, and they present scholarship as salutary truth-telling. For example, Anna Haebich has positioned historical scholarship within the polarised public responses to the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission’s Bringing Them Home report (HREOC, 1997), which documented the suffering of Aboriginal families from which governments and church organisations removed children. Taking aim at those who deny or diminish the culpability of the nation, Haebich (2011) pitched scholarship against

… the powerful master narratives that extolled white progress and denied Aboriginal humanity; the ruthless practices to force Indigenous people to forget their own histories of resistance; the pressures to forget injustices that challenged the nation’s history and identity; the public’s covert concern and then desire to forget injustices that seemed to be distant and yet their responsibility; and their turning away so that the issue remained forever unresolved. (p. 1036)

Tom Griffiths (2003) also has evoked the duty of the historian: ‘The sinews of settler memory are palpable and strong, and historians have to wrestle with them’. ¹²

While it is possible for academics to align the duty of historians – to write unflinching narratives based on carefully considered evidence – with the legitimising of Indigenous grievances and the renovation of Australian national identity, the making of Indigenous identity includes decisions to omit some stories, according to the Koorie scholar Shannon Faulkhead (2009):

Part of the active process of remembering also involves forgetting …. [A] number of Indigenous Australian people have stated that their elders have refused to tell them their stories as they believe that they do not apply today, and that the next generation needs to survive in this world …. [S]ome of the elders made an active decision to forget some stories in order to remember the stories that would help in the survival of Koorie people – stories of resistance, atrocities inflicted, and the people lost who may return one day. (p. 79)

Paul Connerton (2008) argues that there may be good reasons to forget. The forgetting of the NMP aligns closely with what Connerton describes as ‘the constitution of a new identity’. The emphasis with this type of forgetting is

… on the gain that accrues to those who know how to discard memories that serve no practicable purpose in the management of one’s current identity and ongoing purposes. Forgetting then becomes part of the process by which newly shared memories are constructed because a new set of memories are [sic] frequently accompanied by a set of tacitly shared silences …. Not to forget might … provoke too much cognitive dissonance: better to consign some things to a shadow world. (Connerton, 2008: 63)

Published Indigenous accounts of the NMP are too few to allow us to judge whether they manifest ‘cognitive dissonance’. ¹³ Indigenous historian Bill Rosser has quoted Indigenous Australians referring to the NMP with forthright moral disgust: ‘those bloody bastards’, in the words of Cyclone Jack, a Queensland Aboriginal man interviewed by Rosser in the 1980s. Cyclone Jack imagined the NMP as foreigners motivated by lust: they seized women and killed resistant men. He doubted that White people could understand the depth of enmities between Aboriginal peoples from different regions: ‘Just because they’re all black, that doesn’t mean they’re all mates’ (Rosser, 1990: 64, 82, 113). Recently, Queensland Aboriginal author Sam Watson was reported as describing the actions of the NMP as ‘blatant war and genocide. It’s cold-blooded murder’. ¹⁴

Practitioners of heritage

Is it scandalous to forget? Connerton challenges us to ask what purposes would be served by putting at risk the good effects of applying Binary Two to Australia’s military heritage: the positive identities of the two parties – non-Indigenous and Indigenous Australians – who would negotiate reconciliation. To explore this issue, we conducted a focus group at the 2015 Brothers and Sisters in Arms Conference, hosted by the Australian Catholic University and organised by investigators of the Australian Research Council Linkage project Serving Our Country: A History of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People in the Defence of Australia. Our focus group brought together seven non-Indigenous people – male and female – who are professionally involved in the production and management of public narratives, as teachers and researchers of history and heritage, and museum and archive staff. ¹⁵ Discussion lasted 78 minutes, and we initiated it with the following questions:

Most of our participants accepted that the conflict that occurred on the Australian frontier can or should be understood as a war, although they differed as to whether the term ‘war’ held currency at the time. There was a feeling of caution in this regard, in part because of the variations that they had noted in the historical record in terms of public expressions of, and usage of the term, ‘warfare’ (Participant 2). While our participants did not deny that the NMP were prominent in many conflicts, they were keen to underline that efforts to remember them would inevitably be politically motivated. They pointed out that any management of ‘heritage’ requires the careful dissemination of historical scholarship to the wider public, and they spoke from an understanding of their own responsibilities as disseminators of such knowledge. This position of disseminator or negotiator of historical knowledge was constructed against a series of interlinked assumptions about the Australian public.

To begin, the group agreed that the Australian public is divided on the question of whether to recognise the colonisation of Australia as the ‘Frontier Wars’. They also made clear their view that a ‘national’ institution such as the Australian War Memorial would not deploy such a controversial idea until there was more consensus or, at the very least, until a lobbying group had ‘won’ the battle for recognition (Participant 1): recognition and reconciliation placed a special obligation on ‘heritage’ to maximise consensus and avoid being divisive. Against the presumption that heritage should reflect or encourage ‘consensus’, some participants suggested that it was more realistic to assume that the public is divided. Accordingly, any monument could only ever express a particular view of the past; a monument could never express or require a consensus. The group sensed segmentation in the Australian public between those who cherish a particular account of Australia’s military heritage and those who have come to believe in the far more critical account of colonisation. These, they argued, were essentially ‘two conflicting groups of people’ (Participant 6).

In addition, the group also identified a distinct Indigenous public, or a distinct Indigenous experience of, and story-telling about, Australian history, which is currently seeking recognition for the suffering of Indigenous Australians, and is testing its political strength by highlighting that experience. This Indigenous public would not accept, the participants argued, the representation of a heritage of Indigenous disunity (as the NMP would signify). Indeed, as one participant pointed out, in contemporary politics Indigenous Australians strive to present a unified Indigenous voice against political opponents (e.g. the Murdoch Press) that represent them as dis-unified (Participant 1).

In their final word on the mediation of historical scholarship to the wider public, the focus group’s discussions settled around two contradictory propositions. This commenced with an exchange about the possibility that the public is not a static entity; it develops and it is educable. Students, as a segment of the public, demonstrate this in the way that they respond to new and challenging ideas. By contrast, the group was also keen to point out that the public can be quick to reject unfamiliar ideas; to approach it as educable would lead intellectuals and teachers to disappointment.

As moderators we proposed the following provocation: that those on the colonists’ side, killed in the Frontier Wars, should be honoured and that perhaps the only way truly to honour the war dead is to deprive them of any identity at all. To make this claim, we posited that, other than those whom we classify, with careful deliberation, as ‘war criminals’, all those caught up in wars are victims equally deserving of our sympathetic remembrance. We used the ‘unknown soldier’ as an illustration. One participant quickly and strongly rejected this proposal (Participant 3), and no-one in the group dissented from her words. Our provocation also worked to trigger a protracted debate about the prospects of monuments, and again there was little support in the group for including the NMP in Australia’s military heritage. In part, this emerged from the belief that monument construction and memorial processes are rarely about reconciliation and rarely do they heal (see Viejo Rose, 2011). It was also a position that emerged out of an overarching wariness with the surging of what Huyssen (1993) has termed the ‘culture of memory’, along with its political uses, as well as an associated discomfort with modernity’s apparent ‘veritable obsession with the past’ (p. 253) and its ‘voracious and ever-expanding memorial culture’ (Huyssen, 2003: 30). As Participant 1 put it,

We don’t need any more monuments. Look, it’s said that we had, at the end of World War I, the most per head of any of the belligerents. We must be memorialized out now. Everyone’s been building new ones in the last twenty years. We’re proliferating them overseas. I think there’s a very interesting question as to what they are intended to achieve … I don’t think they are evidence of consensus. I think they’re evidence of a particular lobby group having won the battle of recognition. (Participant 1)

This statement was not offered as a rationale for forgetting the NMP, as a number of participants were at pains to point out: they are all researchers and teachers prepared to deal with the NMP in their professional and academic lives, and they hold firm beliefs about recognition and reconciliation. Rather, their wariness of memorialization was linked to its over-abundance: ‘There are so many monuments to so many things’ (Participant 6). Their wariness can also be explained by the acknowledgement that monuments, on the whole, fail to adequately ‘capture’ or ‘represent’ the past, as another of our participants noted (Participant 4). And certainly their utterances were congruent with the view that memorials ‘produce a deceptive sense of totality, throwing into the shadows, even into oblivion, stories, details and unexpected points of view that keep the intellect active and the memory digging’ (Hartman, 1992: 319).

In light of these reservations, many participants were more inclined to consider the possibilities for curating a museum exhibition or gallery that could delve into the moral complexities of this history and thus incorporate the NMP into a wider analysis of the occupation of Australia (Participants 1 and 5). Without ‘forgetting’ the NMP, our participants asked whether ‘… today’s Indigenous communities can afford to acknowledge fractures in what seems … to be a kind of unitary construction of Indigeneity’, one ‘that is so important for contemporary politics’ (Participant 1). Historical truth might unsettle a positive political identity for Indigenous Australians. This concern is evident in the following comments:

There’s this threat of undermining any kind of progress that they have been trying to make to justify themselves as a more … how do you say it … effective part of our greater population and the contributions that they make. (Participant 7)

… I don’t necessarily think it’s healthy to bring back deeply traumatic episodes in communities’ pasts. It might be, but equally it might not be, and therefore to me the key question that I keep returning to is ‘why are we remembering what we remember’? We don’t have to remember it all just because it’s there. (Participant 1)

We run the risk, in pushing the remembrance of the Frontier Wars, that we end up in a place that none of us actually want to end up in, yeah. (Participant 6)

In these discussions, participants pointed to the tensions that have emerged between contemporary constructions of Indigenous identity and the obligations of historical investigations into Australia’s colonial past. It is important to recall that our focus group was made up entirely of non-Indigenous people. Their confident imagining of the Indigenous point of view was part of their positive identity as non-Indigenous Australians of post-colonial sympathies.

Conclusion

Australians’ willingness to honour the nation’s military heritage was first visible in the proliferation of war memorials across the country immediately following World War I, and the subsequent establishment of the Australian War Memorial. A resurgence of military memories in the 1980s allowed war to remain central to Australia’s political culture. In the nation’s continued observance of Anzac memory, some elasticity is evident in the efforts that have been made to develop a shared, transnational account of Australia’s war memories: the installation of extra-territorial monuments along the Western Front, the more recent memorials such as the Hellfire Pass in Thailand and the Kokoda Track in Papua New Guinea (Beaumont, 2015). Another indication of this elasticity can be found in remembrances of the Turkish ‘foe’ at Gallipoli and the subsequent celebration of a positive relationship between Australia and Turkey. Indeed, the increasing incorporation of Turkish experiences into Australia’s collective memory points to a softening of the need of the nation to self-identify in oppositional terms, at least when it comes to externally oriented self-definitions.

Less well established is the ‘willingness’ of the nation to honour the Frontier Wars as national military heritage. Crucially, the Frontier Wars point to a national narrative that pre-dates Gallipoli, and as a story of war as conquest/resistance, framing Australia’s war heritage in terms that include the Frontier Wars seems likely to shatter the fantasy of ‘innocence’ epitomised by Anzac memory. Resistance to Binary Two’s remembrance of the Frontier Wars as part of Australia’s military heritage may take the form of insistence on Binary One: honouring the Indigenous contribution to Australian military campaigns overseas. However, it is our impression that many Australians accept that the colonial process was war, and that Aboriginal peoples served honourably in that war as they fought against invasion. Those who advocate for the inclusion of the Frontier Wars in Australia’s military heritage remember Indigenous Australians as warriors who resisted invasion, but may forget them as troopers enforcing invasion. Binary Two facilitates a positive Indigenous identity (patriots and victims, not compromised by complicity) and a renovated non-Indigenous identity (honest admission of ‘our’ invasion, complemented by inclusion of those resistance fighters in a renovated pantheon of patriotic service), but it is itself a revised mythologising of Australian history, eliding the more difficult heritage of the NMP.

Let us return to Sara Ahmed’s discussion of many contemporary Australians’ willingness to say ‘sorry’ to Indigenous Australians. She argues that this expression of national shame ‘exposes the nation, and what it has covered over and covered up in its pride in itself, but at the same time it involves a narrative of recovery as the re-covering of the nation’ (Ahmed, 2005: 79, emphasis in original). This acknowledgement and disclosure of an ugly past equates, in Macdonald’s terms, to difficult heritage or negative self-history. But is it ‘difficult’ enough? While we sympathise with Binary Two because of the political identities that it makes available, and while we recognise that any widely accepted historical narrative is likely to be mythological in nature, we also think that the Australian heritage should find some ways to acknowledge and memorialise the NMP. Our focus group thought that memorialising the NMP could significantly disturb the political identity of Indigenous Australians and have a negative bearing on the negotiation of reconciliation. In these remarks, our focus group participants demonstrated – to us at least – that what is at stake here is not only the Indigenous identity that draws on a narrative of resistance but also the identities of those ‘post-colonial’ Australians who, by embracing their nation’s ‘difficult heritage’, see themselves as morally qualified to engage in a dialogue of reconciliation with Indigenous Australians. ¹⁶