The AWM and Historians’ Made-up Wars
Robert Hill, Quadrant, Aug 28 2026
On November 14, 2025, Rachel Perkins and Henry Reynolds came to the Australian War Memorial to launch The Australian Wars, a collection edited by Perkins, Stephen Gapps, Mina Murray and Reynolds. There is nothing remarkable about a work of military history being launched at the War Memorial; it is precisely where one might expect such a book to be presented and sold. What was remarkable was that The Australian Wars does not establish its subject as military history so much as assert it. The book presents a politically and ideologically charged reconstruction of colonial violence as warfare, yet the military characteristics necessary to sustain that classification are not merely contested: when examined, they are strikingly absent. Its launch inside the Memorial, and its inclusion within the Memorial’s bookshop, therefore, did more than promote a book: it bestowed institutional legitimacy upon the conclusion before the historical case had been made.
The issue is not whether violence occurred on the British colonial frontier in Australia — hereafter, the “British frontier”. Aboriginal people were killed, settlers were killed, massacres occurred and reprisals followed. The far larger claim is that these events amounted to wars: conflicts properly belonging to the same historical category as the wars and military operations commemorated within the Australian War Memorial. That distinction matters. Much of the alleged warfare occurred not on the frontier of an Australian nation, but on the frontiers of separate British colonies under the Crown. To place those conflicts within the Australian War Memorial therefore requires more than demonstrating colonial violence. It requires demonstrating that the historical threshold of war was actually met. That proposition deserves something stronger than repetition, moral force or modern consensus.
It requires proof.
In my earlier article at Quadrant Online, The ‘Wars’ That Weren’t, I demonstrated that once the constituent incidents are disaggregated, the national “Frontier Wars” narrative loses its military coherence. What remains are separate episodes of killing, reprisal, policing and local resistance. Here I reach the same conclusion from the opposite direction. If these really were wars, where is the military footprint they should have left behind?