Category Archives: Colonial history

The Australian War Memorial scandal

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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?

Read the rest HERE . . .

Endemic violence in primitive communities

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A Blood-Soaked Land: Part II

Robert Hill, Quadrant, Aug 21 2026

Cultural lethal violence was institutionalised in Aboriginal societies in a way that sustained warfare was not. Payback and retaliatory punishment could be socially sanctioned or obligatory, but there were no standing armies, permanent commands or institutions for sustained military campaigning. The deep record is therefore one of recurring lethal violence, not continuous war.

The same caution should apply to the frontier. Killing, reprisal and punitive expedition did not automatically become “war” merely because one participant was British. Yet modern revisionism increasingly reverses the categories: raid and reprisal between Aboriginal groups remain “feud” or “payback”, while analogous episodes involving the British are aggregated across decades and vast distances into “Frontier Wars”. In the process, scattered resistance is retrospectively endowed with a military coherence the underlying social organisation did not possess.

Demographically, the terminology changes nothing. A man killed in revenge is no less dead because his death is called payback rather than warfare. What matters is frequency, lethality and persistence.

Comparative anthropology reinforces the distinction. Lawrence Keeley, professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago and author of the influential Oxford University Press study War Before Civilization, showed from archaeological and ethnographic evidence that recurring raids and relatively small clashes could impose heavy proportional losses on non-state populations. More revealing still are anthropologists Douglas Fry and Patrik Söderberg. In a peer-reviewed 2013 study published in Science, they systematically examined lethal aggression in 21 mobile forager societies drawn from the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample. Their conclusion cuts against claims of ubiquitous primitive warfare: most lethal incidents were homicide, interpersonal disputes or feud, while warfare constituted only a minority.

That does not weaken the argument. It defines it.

Read the rest HERE . . .

Read Robert Hill’s The myth of Invasion

The endemic violence in primitive societies

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Before Settlement, a Blood-Soaked Land Part I

Robert Hill, Quadrant Aug 20 2026

Australian history has been distorted by lies, fabrication, exaggeration and selective evidence. Out of that distortion has emerged one overwhelming story: that the British arrived in 1788 and turned a peaceful continent into a land of violence, massacre and war.

The truth begins in exactly the opposite place.

The British did not enter a peaceful continent. They entered a continent occupied by peoples living in what, in the older anthropological sense, was one of the most materially primitive and socially fragmented forms of human organisation still surviving on earth: thousands of small, mobile, familial groups, without settled agriculture, cities, writing, courts, police or any authority standing above them capable of ending feud and revenge. It is difficult to conceive of a substantially simpler enduring form of human social organisation. Below the small local group lies little more than the immediate or extended family itself. But no human population could remain reproductively isolated at that level for generation after generation: sustained mating within such a narrow circle would inevitably produce repeated close-relative unions and increasing inbreeding. Survival therefore required some network of bestowal, female transfer, and contact between otherwise small and politically separate groups.

Revenge killing, payback, punitive expeditions, sorcery killing, ritual punishment, conflict over women and armed fighting between neighbouring groups were already part of the continent’s human landscape. Within the societies in which these practices operated, much of this violence was not regarded as aberrant criminality but as culturally sanctioned conduct, expected, legitimate and, in some circumstances, obligatory. I refer collectively to these recurring forms of socially embedded killing as “cultural lethal violence”. So too, in different places and circumstances, were infanticide, the abandonment or killing of elderly and incapacitated people, and other brutal responses to the material constraints of subsistence life. Practices varied between regions, and no single pattern can be attributed uniformly to every Aboriginal group. But the underlying forms of violence are well attested.

Read the rest HERE . . .

Read Robert Hill’s The myth of Invasion

The dreamtime enters history

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The ideological concoction of history

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Pemulwuy: Coward, Thief, Killer

Robert Hill, Quadrant, Aug 07 2026

No Aboriginal figure has acquired greater symbolic importance in the modern construction of the “Frontier Wars” than Pemulwuy, and no episode associated with him has been more heavily mythologised than the confrontation now called the “Battle of Parramatta” in 1797. The elevation of a brief, unattributed colonial account into a major military engagement has supplied the emerging frontier-war narrative with both a commanding hero and a foundational battle.

The modern Pemulwuy is not merely the product of generous interpretation. He has been constructed through the cumulative enlargement of fragmentary, unattributed and often much later accounts. Hearsay became fact. Raiding became warfare. A clash became a battle. A notorious local outlaw became the commander of a resistance movement.

A short article cannot examine every contradiction and embellishment within that transformation. It can, however, expose its essential structure. The contemporary evidence does not securely establish Pemulwuy as the commander of an Aboriginal army, the leader of a regional political coalition or the architect of a sustained military campaign. Even the killing most strongly associated with him rests upon an identification that is plausible rather than conclusive.

Read the rest HERE . . .

Spirituality and Modern Australian Fiction

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I had not heard of Russell Guy before reading this essay. Two things strike me in this engaging reflection. First, he tells the story of the writer struggling to have his writing known in a time when ideology predominates over truth and worth. Second, he presents a rebalancing of the narrative about European settlement and its effect on Aboriginal people. The inevitable historical meeting was not one-sided, and Christianity is given its rightful place. I’ve noted the titles of his two novels with the intention of reading them.

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Russell Guy: ‘Two things of which I’m certain: a nation that rejects its Christian foundation will go the way of Great Britain, and fiction that focuses on the spiritual consequences of individual lives can effect its redemption.

Spirituality and Modern Australian Fiction

Russell Guy, Quadrant, Jul 08 2026

Adapted from talks given by the author at the Alice Springs Public Library and Winton Writers Festival in June 2026.

I’m interested in spirituality and modern Australian fiction because that’s how my writing has developed and been influenced. The last three verses of Henry Lawson’s ‘The Good Samaritan’, written in 1904, is, I believe, because he was so often desperately in need of one, a classic example:

‘Once on a time there lived a man,’
       But he has lived alway,
And that gaunt, good Samaritan
       Is with us here to-day;
He passes through the city streets
       Unnoticed and unknown,
He helps the sinner that he meets —
       His sorrows are his own.

He shares his tucker on the track
       When things are at their worst
(And often shouts in bars outback
       For souls that are athirst).
To-day I see him staggering down
       The blazing water-course,
And making for the distant town
       With a sick man on his horse.

He’ll live while nations find their graves
       And mortals suffer pain —
When colour rules and whites are slaves
       And savages again.
And, after all is past and done,
       He’ll rise up, the Last Man,
From tending to the last but one —
       The good Samaritan.’

Verse as good as any Bob Dylan has written.

In 1978, I wrote a story, published in Tracks surfing magazine, called What’s Rangoon to You is Grafton to Me. I adapted it to radio for Sydney’s 2JJ and it crossed-over to Radio National. Since then, it’s been pirated via the Internet and a perpetual link at the ABC.

Rangoon contains glimpses into New Age spirituality, with fragments of Christianity and Islam, as the anonymous protagonist, driving all-night from Brisbane to Sydney, ponders the Second Coming of “you know Who”, while jellyfish flap across the Pacific Highway in a nod to surrealism.

Read the rest HERE . . .

The Desecration of the Australian War Memorial

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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.

Read the rest HERE . . .

Concocting history – the non-existence wars with the Aborigines

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Robert Hill is at the forefront of those powerfully challenging the stories concocted by government-funded groups who are furiously rewriting Australian history. A curse on those institutions that ought to defend Australia but are collapsing like a house of cards. Australians need someone like Pauline Hanson to have the guts not only to defend the truth but to stop the colossal amounts of money going to the fat cats of the Aboriginal industry.

indig giles

The ‘Wars’ That Weren’t

Robert Hill, Quadrant, Jun 23 2026

Reports and Senate Estimates evidence suggest there is a “Frontier Wars” display being developed within the Australian War Memorial’s pre-1914 treatment, with  suggestions that the relevant pre-1914 gallery space may be around 400 square metres. The precise public plan remains difficult to identify, which is itself part of the problem.

There is no publicly available record that explains the evidentiary basis for the inclusion of such a gallery and its contravention of the AWM charter. No clear public criteria have been produced. No public account explains how the Memorial proposes to distinguish war from massacre, reprisal, murder, policing, punitive expedition, settler violence, food raiding, stock spearing or localised tribal conflict.

Read the rest HERE . . .

What is the Australian character and culture?

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Many Australians are reacting fiercely today to threats to Australia’s character and culture from ideological or national groups. What character and culture, some are asking? Indeed, the more extreme deny that such a character and culture exist. In the final chapter of my book, PRISON HULK TO REDEMPTION, I sketch what I understand as Australia’s character and culture.

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An excerpt from chapter 19, ‘Cultural Continuities in 1900’, Prison Hulk to Redemption, available through Amazon.

From the outset [of Prison Hulk to Redemption], I endeavoured to depict a new, independent nation emerging from Captain Phillip’s seminal act of planting the Union Jack in the soil of Sydney Cove. In a remarkably short time, the inaugural members of this new nation began to refer to their land and themselves as Australia and Australians, though still closely connected to their origins in the British Isles. The fiery and intemperate William Charles Wentworth embodied those who experienced no doubts about themselves and the new nation they were forging. But what, precisely, does this Australianness entail?

Australianness represents a profound modification of Britishness, the unifying culture of the British Isles—England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland—rooted in the broader culture of Christian Europe. Although Australians retained many traditions, customs, and social and political institutions from Great Britain, as well as the arts and literature, and were content to do so, their experiences led them to develop fundamentally distinct identities from their counterparts in the British Isles. The varied physical environment contributed to the emergence of a unique, independent expression of Britishness. Consequently, all traditions, customs, and institutions brought over by the First Fleet were transformed, regardless of how subtle these changes might sometimes have been. Although this transformation began as soon as Captain Phillip planted the British flag, it was not until the 1880s that overseas observers began to notice a distinctly Australian character.

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Concocted history

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It’s in vogue for the woke class – appointing coal black actors to play characters from lily-white stories, sometimes centuries-old, and concocting history as a demonstration that objections are racially motivated. The American feminist program ‘The View’ is shamelessly guilty of this propaganda trick. Of course, in Australia we have battalions of government-funded academics busy spinning the most preposterous ‘histories’ of the Aboriginals.

Writing us out of our civilisational collapse

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