> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://goodoil.news/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Using Sacred Ground to Peddle Lies - URL: https://goodoil.news/using-sacred-ground-to-peddle-lies/ - Published: 2026-09-04T22:00:12.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-04T22:00:11.000Z - Description: A shrine for the dead is being turned into a seminar for the living grievance industry. - Author: Lushington Brady - Tags: AUS Politics, History, Aborigines The Australian War Memorial was established as a shrine, and repository for the relics of, Australians who were/are veterans and the families and descendants of those who fought in wars for Australia. That was in a time when the political class in Australia had often fought in wars themselves or at least had the commensurate respect for those who did. But we live now in an age where the vast majority of the political class have neither military experience, nor much respect for those who do. Witness, after all, their shameful hounding of **Ben Roberts-Smith**, and by extension every non-commissioned veteran of the Afghanistan war. The only moral compass the Albanese government has is peddling the ideological nostrums of fashionable leftism. Hence, Albanese handed the directorship of the AWM to an old Labor mate and the memorial’s mission statement now reads like the minutes of a student Marxist collective. A visitor to its website is immediately greeted with the ludicrous message that “This website contains names, images and voices of deceased Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples,” as well as the no-doubt astonishing revelation that it “contains war-related material”. Worse, its annual report opens with a lengthy discursion on its “Aboriginal Cultural and Historical Context”. But the Labor leftist machine isn’t done with bowdlerising the nearest thing to a sacred secular space this country has, in the name of Aboriginal grievance. > [On November 14, 2025,](https://quadrant.org.au/news-opinions/history/the-awm-and-historians-made-up-wars/?ref=goodoil.news) **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. This is of a piece with academic ‘history’ in Australia, as it stands today. The ludicrous ‘Massacre Map’, for instance, much of which is either of exceedingly tenuous provenance, is flatly contradicted by the primary historical record, or presented so out of context as to skate on the edge of outright lies (ignoring, for instance, that many so-called ‘massacres’ were revenge killings for unprovoked massacres by Aboriginal bands). Yet, there it sits on academic websites, with the imprimatur of supposed ‘truth’. Then there’s the ridiculous fairy-tales of serial bullshit-artist **Bruce Pascoe** – flooded into school libraries and rewarded with an ‘Aboriginal’ academic sinecure for a bloke whose entire family tree has been traced back to England. > 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. Nobody serious denies that people were killed on the British colonial frontier. Aboriginal people died. Settlers died. Massacres were perpetrated by both. Reprisals from both followed. The leap is the claim that these episodes belong in the same category as the wars the memorial was built to commemorate. Much of the killing occurred not on the frontier of an Australian nation but on the frontiers of separate British colonies under the Crown. To hang those events on the walls of the AWM you need more than hearsay and a publishing contract. You need to show that the threshold of war was actually crossed. Look too closely at the incidents in context, and past the ideological capture, and the ‘Frontier Wars’ narrative loses its military spine. What remains are killings, reprisals, policing and local resistance. If these really were wars, where is the military footprint they ought to have left? A conflict does not become a war because an activist historian needs it to be one, any more than it ceases to be a war because a government prefers a quieter word. Britain did not generally call the Northern Ireland Troubles a war. The IRA did. It doesn’t become a ‘war’ because one side says so, or ceases to be one because the other says different. Labels are not evidence. > The classification must be tested against what actually happened: organisation, intensity, continuity, military purpose, reciprocal violence and the conduct of the supposed belligerents. That is why **Lord Glenelg**’s July 1837 despatch matters. Considering Aboriginal deaths at the hands of Major **Thomas Mitchell**’s exploring party, the Secretary of State for War and the Colonies was blunt. Aboriginal people on territory claimed by Britain were subjects within the Queen’s allegiance. They were not, Glenelg said, “aliens with whom a war can exist”. The telling part is that it would have been entirely convenient for the Crown if they were. The Queen’s troops could then simply exercise the rights of belligerents against them. Instead, the Crown treated the violence as exactly what it was: a criminal act, by either side. Thus where an Aborigine died at the hands of the Queen’s officers, Glenelg wanted an inquest. He spoke of protecting Aboriginal people against “lawless outrage” and of the importance attached to “the life of a native”. Glenelg could have avoided a whole series of headaches by the expedience of calling the violence ‘war’. Instead, he rightly denoted it as a series of crimes against and by British subjects, black and white. The likes of Perkins and Reynolds might argue that Glenelg got it wrong, or simply lied. In which case, the onus is on them to prove it. They have to show identifiable belligerents, organisation, continuity, military purpose and reciprocal armed contest. But they cannot. A state is not at war merely because violence occurs inside territory it governs. Worse, for them, is the pure bizarreness of the barrow of bullshit they’re pushing uphill. Life would simply have been much easier for Glenelg, the Crown and the subsequent Australian nation to have called the frontier violence a ‘war’. For the simple reason that, firstly, it would have relieved administrators like Glenelg of the headache of pursuing criminal investigations. More importantly, it would at a stroke have settled any question of who subsequently owned the land. If the Aborigines fought a war with the British and lost, then the legal issues would have been clear-cut: by right of conquest, the British and the Commonwealth of Australia which succeeded them, would have unassailable legal right to the territory they had conquered. The current leftist nostrum of ‘Aboriginal sovereignty’ would then be exposed beyond all doubt for what it is: a legal and historical fiction. --- 💡 ****If you enjoyed this article please share it using the share buttons at the top or bottom of the article.**