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One could not learn history from architecture any more than one could learn it from books. Statues, inscriptions, memorial stones, the names of streets – anything that might throw light upon the past had been systematically altered – George Orwell, “1984”.
Add to that, war memorials.
At least the hateful anti-Semitic thugs of the ‘pro-Palestine’ are honest, in their cretinous way, when they vandalise war memorials. The taxpayer-funded thugs of the Long March Left who’ve infested our institutions can do nothing but lie, while they grotesquely vandalise Australia’s most sacred secular space.
When the Australian War Memorial redevelopment is completed in 2028, visitors will learn that Australia’s wars did not start in South Africa with the state contingents sent to fight the Boers but 100 years earlier with the Aboriginal warrior Pemulwuy and his raids on the settlement at Sydney Cove.
While it’s certainly true that the expansion of settlement led to conflicts with Aboriginal people, sometimes widespread, it’s hard to call any of these wars given that at no stage did the British or the subsequent colonial governments regard themselves as being “at war” with Aboriginal people.
Or perhaps we should take them at their word and treat tribal bands going at it with bark shields and wooden spears as ‘war’. In which case, Australia’s war history didn’t begin in 1788: it began at least 45,000 years ago, and the most incessant warmongers this land has known are the Aborigines. Worse, Aborigines are still waging ‘war’ on each other with vicious determination. How else, if tribal fights are ‘wars’, should we interpret the bands regularly duking out tribal conflicts with axes and machetes, in remote communities?
They can’t have it both ways.
Nor should they be allowed to use public money to desecrate a public memorial, sacred to memory of our fallen, with vicious lies.
Characterising the spearing of stock and the killing of stockmen – and the subsequent often brutal reprisals – as war is far from simply a more honest retelling of Australia’s past. It feeds a one-sided narrative that Australia was built on “unceded”, even “stolen” land; and justifies the attacks on celebrating Australia Day, the demands for reparations and the racial division that was fundamental to the prime minister’s voice proposal.
In other words, it’s part of the left’s project to delegitimise Australia, especially given that this revisionism is often based on exaggerated and unreliable oral traditions, long after events, in the absence of witness accounts from the time.
The other spear in the left’s arsenal is pushing lies as ‘history’ in classrooms, indoctrinating generations of children to hate their country.
The latest episode in what is inevitably a blackening of Australia’s history is a new “teaching resource”, for years nine and 10, titled Australia’s War History, just published by the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia with support from, among others, the Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority and the History Teachers Association of Australia.
As you’d expect, it’s a farrago of hateful mendacity. It can’t even get the most basic facts right.
According to this new school resource, “the Bathurst War is part of the Australian Wars. This took place in 1824 when British Governor Macquarie declared martial law against the Wiradjuri people trying to stop their land being taken.”
Is it mere pedantry to observe that it was actually Governor Thomas Brisbane who was in office in 1824, not Macquarie (he resigned in 1820); or does this kind of elementary error taint the whole exercise?
Egregious historical mistakes aside, the document also ignores that the declaration of martial law followed months of atrocities and murders committed by the Wiradjuri, who, having been regarded as British subjects from the moment the colony was founded, were subject to British law. That law mandated punishment for murderers, black and white.
Martial law was a response to what the colonial government saw as lawless violence; it was hardly a declaration of war against Aboriginal people […]
The document’s concession that there were “some attempts to create co-operation between the British and Aboriginal people” wholly fails to do justice to the attitudes of early governments – starting with the British government’s injunction to Captain Arthur Phillip to “live in amity and kindness” with the native people and to punish anyone who should “wantonly destroy them or give them any unnecessary interruption in the exercise of their several occupations”.
This was the attitude of every colonial governor; and in the wake of the notorious Myall Creek massacre (where stockmen killed up to 30 Aboriginal people in cold blood, resulting in seven white men being hanged for the murder) was explicitly reiterated by governor George Gipps, who declared that all Aboriginal people were “subjects of the Queen”.
This is something the likes of the lying ‘Massacre Maps’ will never, ever tell gullible students: the relatively few massacres (far fewer than the mendacious ‘Map’ claims): massacres were never seen by authorities as anything but lawless violence, no matter whether the perpetrators were black or white. White murderers were not just subject to legal punishment, but public opprobrium. The Coniston massacre, the last in Australia, generated massive public outrage.
By contrast, Aboriginal murderers were often let off remarkably leniently by authorities.
When the leading Aboriginal warrior, Windradyne, eventually gave himself up to governor Brisbane at Parramatta, he was received with a feast and presents.
In the same period, one of the main ringleaders of Aboriginal violence in Tasmania was apprehended several times, without being executed for murder, which is completely at odds with the claims of a so-called ‘war of extermination’.
Lest anyone doubt just how vile and mendacious the Academy of Social Science’s war history really is, simply consider that it completely fails to mention at all Sir John Monash, the Australian who is renowned as one of the most remarkable commanders of WWI. Monash not only rose through the ranks to command remarkable victories on the Western Front that helped determine the course of the war, but pioneered many aspects of modern warfare. Monash was also the last, and one of the few, non-Americans to command American soldiers in the field.
But that is obviously far too likely to make students proud of their country. No wonder he’s scrubbed from the curriculum.
