First of all, my humble thanks for the warm reception my first essay in this forum on Tuesday received from Echidna readers.

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Almost 50 of you responded with your thoughts on the frontier wars and whether or not they should be given full recognition in the Australian War Memorial. While, as I expected, some comments fell into the "shit happens" camp of which I was once a member, more than three-quarters of the respondents, many of whom grew up in the 1960s and 1970s, identified with the journey I described.

That is, after having been taught little or nothing about the darker side of European settlement at school, they had come to learn about the massacres, brutality and settler-inflicted violence as adults and now acknowledge the conflict was widespread, that Indigenous deaths numbered in the millions and that this chapter in our history needs to be acknowledged.

While I respect the views of those of you who disagree with me (having held similar ones myself not that long ago), I would ask you to consider an analogy between the events described in H.G. Wells's The War Of The Worlds and what happened here and in other countries forcibly settled by Europeans.

Would Wells's Martians have considered their actions - a genocidal attempt to eradicate humanity and the introduction of a plant (the red weed) to displace the existing vegetation - a war?

If one adopts the traditional European viewpoint on colonisation and settlement then the answer is obviously no. They did not consider humanity to be their equals and made no attempt to negotiate or come to terms with earthly governments.

As far as the Martians were concerned the blue planet was infested with a pest animal species that needed to be eradicated before they could erect their own Xanadu.

The human viewpoint, as is the case with the Indigenous perspective on the settlement of this country, is very different. Wells was not just being ironic when he called his novel The War of the Worlds.

While some may baulk at an analogy drawn from science fiction it is actually appropriate given that the frontier wars had a Lovecraftian postscript ripped straight from the pages of a horror story or the 1956 movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers (which was based on a serialised novella by Jack Finney).

An obvious question that rarely gets asked is if more than 2 million Indigenous deaths were caused by European settlement where are the bodies? While settler remains from the........

© Canberra Times