The AWM - Memorial or Museum?

 

Vietnam memorial as it looked when I visited in 2020.

A low-key announcement was made in a press conference on 6th October by Matt Keogh, Minister for Veterans' Affairs in the presence of Brendan nelson, the Chairman of the War Memorial's governing Council, saying that the current $550 million expansion of the memorial would allow for greater attention to the frontier wars.

There are two elements to this announcement that are worth discussing, gentle reader.

The first is the cost of the expansion, and in my view, the necessity for it. I have been an infrequent visitor to the AWM, mostly in relation to my project on national service. On these occasions, the staff (particularly in the reading room) have been very helpful, and the holdings in the library are extremely important.

The many displays, on the other hand, and their cost, are in my opinion, difficult to justify. It's almost as if the displays have taken on a life of their own, being developed and re-developed at a furious rate. Perhaps the haste is driven by the possibility that in time we may run out of war memorabilia to. display. It only....

I guess they have an educative function, but maybe that function could better be implemented by the teaching in our schools of the facts of our wartime history, rather than the mythology. There is a need, and always has been, to create mobile displays that take the history to the schools in their local situations, rather than expecting organised (and expensive) tours to be organised.

The second noteworthy element is the introduction of the commemoration of the frontier wars into the role of the AWM. This has always been controversial, driven by the notion that a war is only a war when people in uniform fight it. This is a strange concept driven more by the ANZAC myth than the reality of history. The fact that our colonial history is pretty ugly, does not mean we should ignore it. That's simply another form of "cancel culture", that the conservative media rails against.

It's difficult to ignore genocide (the destruction of the Palawa) and the massacres, both by Aboriginal Australians, and the settlers, that are recorded in our colonial history.

What I found quite bizarre, is the reaction of some members of our veteran community., who believe that they have a unique ownership of our military history, and are only people entitled to hold an opinion about it.

The phenomenon observed in the ranks of some that "my war was worse than yours" reminds me of the days (mostly during the seventies and mid-eighties) when RSL clubs turned Vietnam veterans away, because we were told "Your war wasn't a real War..."

Obviously, as a nation we've learned something since that time. 

If only we ran out of wars...