The Capture by Stealth of the AWM
Robert Hill, Quadrant, 20 July 2026
“A major feature on Frontier Wars will piss off the majority of Australia’s 600,000 veterans.” So warned Major General Greg Melick in 2022, when he was National President of the RSL and a member of the Australian War Memorial Council.
“The fundamental element is that the War Memorial was built in sacred recognition of wars that Australians fought as a nation, unified against an external foe. It is not to be a memorial for conflicts within Australia,” Barnaby Joyce said in 2022.
These statements expose the question the Memorial has never honestly answered: if a major Frontier Wars display would so profoundly disturb the veterans whose service the Memorial exists to honour, why has the policy been advanced without a clear public announcement, published legal advice, or a frank explanation of how it fits within the Australian War Memorial Act?
I am not a military man. I do not claim the authority of service. But my love for this country could not be greater. I know sacrilege when I see it.
The Australian War Memorial is the last place still standing largely outside the ideological capture of our national institutions. It is where politics is meant to fall silent before the dead; where the nation goes not to be lectured, corrected or re-educated, but to remember those who served and those who died.
Yet we are living inside a national fog of exaggeration and fabrication surrounding the so-called Frontier Wars. Claims unsupported by military reality are forced upon us as settled truth, even where no war existed.
The more immediate question is how this contested project became institutional policy. It was not advanced by open argument, but by stealth: through an ideological sequence and in a vacuum of justification. No clear public mandate was sought. No legal reasoning was published. No serious explanation was offered to veterans or the wider public as to why a contested account of colonial violence belongs within the statutory war memorial.