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Category Archives: History
Non Nobis Domine
The inspiring masculine end to Kenneth Brenaugh’s production of Henry V.
The Australian War Memorial scandal
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?
Endemic violence in primitive communities
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 Robert Hill’s The myth of Invasion
Women destroy civilisations
It’s a simple arithmetic sum of subtraction: contraception, abortion, refusal to marry, childlessness, lesbianism.
The endemic violence in primitive societies
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 Robert Hill’s The myth of Invasion
Questions missing from the census
While completing my online census questions last night, I realised four vital questions were missing:
Are you a full-blooded Aboriginal, living the traditional life of the Aboriginal in all its primitiveness, without recourse to any support from modern Australian society? YES/NO
Are you a full-blooded Aboriginal taking advantage of all that modern Australia has to offer? YES/NO
Are you a reinvented white-Aboriginal, predominantly of European ancestry, having no connection whatever with the traditional life of the full-blooded Aboriginal? YES/NO
Are you a reinvented white-Aboriginal, indistinguishable from your fellow Australian of Anglo-Celtic origin? YES/NO
A warning from Ireland
‘Every generation inherits a country, we redefine it and redesign it. Ireland is already a multicultural country, we are not going to undo it, we can’t go back to that time.’
Black Nigerian migrant to Ireland.
The dreamtime enters history
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.
The solution: repeal the Native Title Act
What Mabo has Wrought
Peter O’Brien, Quadrant , Aug 04 2026
In my latest book, Juukan – the New Dark Emu (order it here), I postulate that, in the wake of the ludicrous findings of the Parliamentary Enquiry into the legal demolition by Rio Tinto of two nondescript rock shelters , protection of Aboriginal heritage will become an increasingly intolerable burden for mining companies to bear. A recent judgment by the Federal Court against Fortescue Mining Group bears that out. What follows is an extract from my book and some observations about the latest developments.
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In its submission to the Juukan Parliamentary Enquiry, Fortescue (FMG) describes itself as a “proud” Western Australian company, no doubt to establish right off that they have been listening to, and learning from, their “native title partners”.
FMG has seven agreements with different native title holders, and they note:
Among other things, the Native Title Agreements facilitate the identification and protection of significant Aboriginal cultural heritage through Aboriginal Cultural heritage surveys. As a result of these surveys, Fortescue and native title holders have surveyed 2.5 million km2 of land and identified and protected over 5900 cultural heritage places. Fortescue submits that this extensive protection is evidence that the State cultural heritage protection regime is largely successful.
Not a great start, I would have thought, for FMG to claim that it had surveyed 2.5 million square kilometres, in other words pretty much the whole of Western Australia. Makes you wonder if the figure of 5900 protected sites is also an order of magnitude out.